Labor Time Tracker

Time tracking tools to help small businesses keep a better record of billable time. It’s as simple as starting a timer and letting it run while you get things done. When the job is completed, apply the time. Run a few reports, generate an invoice, and collect your money. Then start the process all over again the next day.

After you’ve been tracking your time diligently for a few months or a few years you’ll have amassed a healthy amount of data — useful for evaluating past productivity and estimating future projects. At Pelago, we’ve found good time tracking practices to be an essential component to project management.

Incorporating time tracking into your day-to-day workflow will give any small business great quantitative insight into productivity. But what about the quality of that time tracked? Simple distractions like a phone call, an exclamation-pointed email, or a question from a co-worker can deter us from the task at hand. Before we know it, half our time has disappeared into an unrecoverable void.

Understanding the quality of the time we’ve tracked is still beyond the capabilities of any online tool, but perhaps that is where we’ll be headed next. It may not be necessary to analyze time tracking data in this way for business tasks like billing clients and paying freelancers. However, understanding the quality of the time spent can be extremely useful for optimizing business productivity.

Imagine being able to deduce that your web designer is most productive during the mornings, and that your developers crank out the most code in the evenings (yeah, I know, you probably don’t need a computer to tell you that developers stay up late). Qualitative time tracking data could help a project manager schedule tasks during the optimal hours for each resource. How cool would that be? Each industry has their next generation products in the works. Could this be ours?

1. Choose like-minded partners who share your vision

A typical web development agency will be started by multiple partners. It is important that the partners share common goals and have skills that are diverse in a complementary kind of way. You don’t want one person getting stuck with all of the peripheral duties like IT, HR, and Legal. It’s best if you can distribute these tasks across all owners. It’s like Tom Waits sings: “We’re chained to the world, and we’ve all got to pull.” You are in this for the long term, make sure your cohorts are too.

2. Don’t always be the nice guy

For whatever reason, some clients are known to make outlandish demands. These demands are harder to deflect when you are first starting out because you need the business. But as you become more established, you need to know when to be the nice guy and when to say no. The problem with being nice all the time is that it sets a precedent. You’ll say “sure, I can knock that out by tomorrow” because, what the heck, today is a slow day. The next time the client has a quick need, they won’t understand why you can’t help them out as quickly as you did the last time. If clients become too accustomed to quick turnarounds, they will start shuffling their internal deadlines around the expectation that you will be available at the last minute, and that is when you really get into trouble.

3. Do not apologize for your rates

It doesn’t really matter what other agencies charge as long as you trust that your rates are a fair price for the service you are providing. You know your business better than anyone else and what rates you need to charge to be successful. You are far better off taking on clients who want to work with you, regardless of the cost. Standing behind your rates and your work tells the client that you are confident and able. Being thrown into a pool of lowest bidders is insulting and a waste of time.

4. Be as clear as possible in your proposal

The proposal and resulting contract should articulate the specifications of the project with as much detail as you can muster. If there is any question about the deliverables, which there will be, you can refer to the spec. Without a clearly defined spec you are leaving the project vulnerable to disagreements that can ruin client relationships. It is also helpful to verbally iterate certain points of the contract before it is signed, in case the client skimmed it too hastily. For example, if you don’t offer web hosting as a service, make sure it is clearly spelled out. Otherwise, the client will expect you to get involved when a mac truck takes out the data center where their site is hosted.

5. Track your time and tasks

This is important enough that we rolled our own web-based time tracking software, Intervals, to manage our projects. Tracking time and tasks gives you invaluable data that can be used to accurately estimate new projects, gauge the health of current projects, and provide clients with detailed invoices. Without this information you will lose money on underestimated projects, fail to meet deadlines, and upset clients over money issues.

Every small business struggles with tracking their time. As a web development shop, we’ve been constantly evolving and improving our time tracking methodologies since we started eight years ago. Here are some tips we have learned along the way.

1. Group your daily tasks by availability and type of work

If you know you are going to have three solid hours to get things done, try to work on a lot of similar tasks. Mentally shifting gears is a productivity killer and will hinder your efforts to track time. It is much easier to keep track of your hours if you can work uninterrupted and on fewer tasks. The best time for this is in the morning, when your mind is fresh and your day hasn’t yet been hijacked by client and coworker needs.

2. Use timers and use them often

Find web-based or desktop timer software that works for you, preferably with multiple timer support, and use it. Get in the habit of starting and stopping timers each time you touch a task. The more you practice at this, the more second-nature it will become. We’ve been doing this long enough now that stopping and starting task timers are a natural part of our workflow.

3. Find your time zone

After a few days of diligent tracking, you should have a pretty good idea of what a normal day looks like in terms of hours tracked. Don’t expect to track every minute at your desk, because it won’t happen. My magic number is 7.5 hours. Knowing my daily number helps me stay focused on getting things done, but also gives me some wiggle room to goof off and surf the ‘net.

4. Turn it into a competition

At the end of each week, compare your hours tracked with your coworkers, or your own previous week. A friendly competition among coworkers is a great way to get people motivated to track their time better. We review and compare our timesheet tracker totals each week, and challenge one another to do better the next week.

With our “task tracker” (the proving grounds for Intervals) we learned a lot about time tracking software. We learned that:

* If you make it difficult to track time…people won’t track time

* If you track time in “general” ways…you don’t learn too much about what is really going on o We’ve learned that tracking time on tasks gives you the best information. It can empower client meetings or future bids that are similar to the current project you are working on

* Even the most diligent people at tracking time need to reminded about it

* Tracking unbillable time in addition to billable time gets people in the habit of tracking time and can give you all kinds of valuable information about internal projects

Good time tracking software pays for itself. Being able to precisely track the time spent on various projects lets you bill your clients accurately and manage your time more efficiently. The time tracking software programs listed here are also easy to learn and use, and include reporting and billing features, features most freeware time tracking software programs don’t have. All are for single use and run on Windows, unless otherwise noted.

1. Dovico Timesheet Tracking Software
This professional time tracking software from Dovico (a Canadian company) has excellent functionality and is inexpensive. The program allows multiple types of time entry, handles multiple projects, lets you create a variety of reports and invoices quickly and easily, and allows data to be exported in a variety of formats. And both the web-hosted or installed version of this time tracking software will integrate with Microsoft Project, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel and Intuit QuickBooks.
Vendor’s Site

2. Project Clock Pro Time Tracking Software
Cyber-Matrix Software is also a Canadian company; Project Clock Pro is also an easy-to-use time tracking and billing system with invoicing and expense management features. Time data can be exported for use with other programs, and customized reports can be created. The outstanding feature of this time tracking software, however, is that it can be used by multiple users over a network.
Vendor’s Site

3. TraxTime Time Tracking Software
TraxTime can also handle unlimited projects, and its punch clock metaphor makes it easy to use. And if you like, you can append memos to the time entries. Customized reports can be sent to printers or disk files, or viewed onscreen. The Manager’s Version of this time tracking software, which is slightly more expensive, allows you to maintain a shared project list and create comprehensive reports for several users.

4. Responsive Time Logger Time Tracking Software
Time Logger lets you track your time while you’re working. But it also does so much more. You can customize reports on screen using drag and drop, use time record data in other applications, customize invoices, and track expenses. This time tracking software program includes a macro facility and a Palm O/S interface, so you can even track your time on your Palm if you’re away from your PC.

5. Labor Time Tracking Software – web time clock
Labor Time Tracker’s entry screen is a weekly grid which displays one week of hour entries at a single glance, which makes it easy to enter hours worked quickly. This time tracker software program has excellent report functionality, and data can be exported in a variety of formats. Because the time tracking software was designed for workgroups, it has more administrative features than other single-use programs.