How Much Time Are You Wasting Tracking Time?

For most employers, payroll is a dreaded task.

Adding up timesheets and cutting the checks can be a time-intensive endeavor. And if you don’t do payroll yourself, you’re probably paying someone to do it for you, which means that you’re still devoting valuable resources to it.

But just because tracking employee time can be time-consuming, doesn’t mean that it needs to be. Thanks to software that’s available today, many once-time-intensive tasks can now be automated; and payroll is certainly no exception.

Business owner Chris Langford, made the leap from manual time entry to automated time management software last year, and found that the time-saving benefits of automation in workflow were obvious. “Four hours of payroll every week has turned into 15 minutes,” he says. “Which means I was spending 16 hours a month running payroll before I started. Now it’s an hour.”

Just as the printing press revolutionized printing and publishing, so automated pc based time clock software is transforming how payroll is done, says Kelly Bistriceanu, Accountant Program Director at TSheets. “As with all new technology, the adoption rate falls along a bell curve…” she says. “But, like the printing press, the businesses that make the leap to core automated systems don’t look back.” It stands to reason the same would hold true for other automatic time tracking software, like Clockify or SaveMyTime.

With this in mind let’s take a look at a few ways that traditional free time tracking and payroll can eat up a significant amount of resources, and see where your time is going

Adding Up Timecards
According to the American Payroll Association, the average time spent adding up timecards is 7 minutes per card. It is not uncommon for organizations with a manual time trackers and payroll process to spend five hours or more calculating payroll at the end of each pay period. Depending on the number of employees you have, this can be a time-consuming process. Especially considering that this entire step can be eliminated with an automated time-tracking app.

Deciphering Bad Handwriting

If your company uses paper timesheets, then you know how much of a hassle it is to try to decipher illegible handwriting. Not only is this a waste of time and drain on profitability, often, the “translation” may be less-than-accurate. Work hours can easily be confused and errors commonly made. Even for businesses that have relatively few team members, time spent deciphering handwriting to get an accurate measure of billable work can add up.

Clerical Errors
Errors can be time-consuming to correct, as well as costly. The American Payroll Association estimates that the average business wastes 1-8 percent of its total payroll on clerical errors. The number of hours worked can be transposed, miscalculations can occur, some of your team’s time can be forgotten about; all of which can contribute to inaccurate paychecks, and lost time

Calculation Errors for Taxes
Time is also wasted when tax season rolls around. The government expects accurate reports on billable hours and invoicing, and heavy tax penalties are levied against companies that don’t comply with tax regulations, but tracking down discrepancies in your paperwork to ensure accuracy can eat up a considerable amount of time.

Inefficient Processes
A study by Planview, carried out by Loudhouse has shown that two of the biggest time wasters during the workday are inefficient processes (44 percent), and overload of paperwork (43 percent). Both of these time wasters go hand in hand when it comes to traditional time tracking methods, which involve inefficient processes, and significant time spent chasing down documents, reviewing timesheets, collecting signatures, calculating hours, and entering data.

Payroll can be a time-consuming process, meaning it’s in your best interest to find at time tracking tool that lets employees clock in and out without disruptions. Ideally this would be a flexible tool, with integrations for other software you use for project management, functionalities you could pick and choose based on what’s best for your team, and hopefully it would work as a desktop app/web app and function on both iOS and Android as a mobile app, as the workplace has become increasingly more flexible in recent years.

Is it easy to find a work time tracker that meets all these specifications? No. But its worth it – as you’ll be cutting down on the work involved with payroll processing to save time and money in the long run. Plus, once you’ve found a project time tracker that works for you, you can continue to scale your company with unlimited users and unlimited projects, and keep track of all of them in real-time.

Your time is valuable, as is the time of your employees, so make sure that you are paying them for the correct hours, the first time around. With an accurate time tracking system, you’ll be able to cut costs, and streamline efficiency. No more wasted time!