The Complete Guide To Time Tracking

Does it have all the features you need?

Really think about what kind of features you want before you sign up.

Having one solution is a lot better than piecing apps together and resorting to spreadsheets to bring it all into one view.

Do you just need it to be able to track employees’ time? Or would you also like to create project budgets and manage payroll? Write down a list of all the features you want and prioritize them so it’s easier to weigh your options.

Most businesses would benefit from a time tracking solution that includes the following features:

• Productivity – Go beyond daily and weekly totals to analyze what was done while tracking time. Productivity features such as activity levels, apps and URLs used, and optional screenshots provide more context for timesheets.
• Invoicing – Instead of exporting timesheets and sending invoices manually, use your time tracking software to automate it. Some tools can auto-generate line items and calculate totals based on hours worked and bill rates that you set for different team members.
• Project budgeting – This is a good feature for any business. Look for software that allows you to set a project budget, and will warn you when your team gets close to going over on hours or costs. If going over budget keeps you up at night, this is going to be a relief.
• Payroll management – There are two things to consider here. First, can the app tell you how much you owe based on time tracked? And are you able to automate payments by adding an integration? We’ll get into this next.
• Automated reports – Don’t waste time creating time tracking reports manually. Find a solution that can create reports for you automatically and deliver them to your inbox. More advanced apps allow you to save filters and have reports generated on a regular basis.

Does it integrate with the solutions you already use?

It’s important that the time tracking tool you decide on can integrate with the tools you already use.

For example, a software development agency would likely benefit from a tool that integrates with GitHub. A sales team, on the other hand, will need a tool that can integrate with the CRM software its sales reps use.

Similarly, if you’re looking for a time tracking solution to track your customer support team’s time, you’ll want to look for one that can integrate with your help desk software.

Checking for integrations before you sign up can save you from the hassle of moving things over later on.

How Hubstaff can help you track time

The reason we know what makes a good time tracking tool is because we built one — Hubstaff — out of personal pain.

Starting a remote business without insight into what was getting done, how teams were working, and what tasks were taking up the most time led us to develop a time tracking tool built on transparency, control, and access to your own data.

The idea behind Hubstaff is to make time tracking as easy as possible for everyone to use while providing detailed and highly useful benchmarks.

Transparency is a big part of what we do. We intentionally designed Hubstaff so that it’s clear how the app works and what is being tracked.

The software gives users control over their work time, and provides them with access to all their information. They can always delete time and the data attached to it, and they’ll get alerts that tell them when the timer is running.

Hubstaff has a number of features that can help you track time more effectively. Let’s take a look at the biggest ones.

Timesheets

This is our most-used (and loved) feature.

After tracking time, you can see daily, weekly, or monthly timesheets for each person or your whole team.

There’s also the option of adding, editing, and deleting time manually. Employees can add notes to clarify time entries. You can then approve or reject timesheets, and send payments all from the app.

Proof of work features

These features are designed to replicate the feeling of all being in the same office — without the distractions.

Hubstaff makes it easy to provide updates and stay in the loop as a team.

The software calculates activity levels based on mouse and keyboard usage, which can help you spot dips or increases in productivity.

From the dashboard, you can see which apps your employees use, as well as which websites they visit while tracking time.

Being able to see both alerts you that it might be time to check-in on a team member. They might be overloaded or they could have the capacity to start new projects.

Finally, you can choose to capture screenshots once, twice, or three times per ten minutes, or not at all. This feature can be turned off and on for different team members. Some companies choose to use this feature during onboarding so they can identify where a new hire might need more training. You can also blur screenshots to protect private data.

Any employee can delete their time, which also means they can delete the screenshots and data that goes with it. This is another way to give them more control over their data.

Employee scheduling

Companies that use paper timesheets might use paper schedules, as well.

Hubstaff streamlines both of these steps by allowing you to plan and schedule one time or recurring shifts.

Once scheduled, you can track attendance and see when shifts are late, missed, or left early based on when team members clock in and out.

Detailed reporting can compile this information, which makes it easier to bring up to a team member in the case of an issue.

Most of the time, shift scheduling can help clarify when and where someone is supposed to be working.

Geofencing and GPS time tracking

As we mentioned above, geofenced time tracking automates the timesheet process by using a device’s GPS location.

There’s a lot more to GPS time tracking, though. Here’s how it can help:

• You can view a live map and see where your crew is at any time during the workday
• You can click on a Job site and get key details including who was there last
• You can view reports and see routes taken throughout the day

And of course, you can trigger time tracking to start and stop or a notification to be sent once specific employees enter or exit Job sites.

Project budgets

You can set project budgets based on costs or hours and get alerts as you approach them.

It’s up to you when you want to be notified. This allows you to make the necessary adjustments to avoid going over budget.

The budgets you can set are:

• Weekly
• Daily
• Project budgets (Specific to that job)
• Client budgets (For all projects)

Vacation and time off requests

This is a feature you might not consider before researching time tracking software, but it is important.

Every team has holidays and breaks to plan for. Hubstaff helps you keep track of paid and unpaid time off and remaining balances.

Employees can send time-off requests to you for approval through the Hubstaff app. You’ll also have a history of requests for each team member.

Payroll

Paying your team should be fast and easy — though it rarely is.

Knowing this, we’ve tried to shorten the distance between tracking time and paying your team.

In Hubstaff, you can set an hourly rate, payment frequency, and payment method for each team member. The app supports both manual and automatic payments.

Then, use one of the most popular payment solutions such as PayPal, Payoneer, Transferwise, or Bitwage to send payments directly.

You’ll get a reminder to review timesheets, and can then send payments in a matter of clicks.

Invoicing

Your invoicing process might be keeping you from getting paid faster. Let us explain.

If you’re manually creating invoices by adding up timesheet hours or doing your own calculations, you could delay how soon your client gets your invoice, and thus, how soon you get paid.

Not to mention that you might miss out on getting paid for the hours you put in due to human error. Even worse, if your invoice is too vague or unclear, you might have clients questioning what they’re paying for.

In other words, nothing good can come from manual, time-intensive invoicing.

That’s why Hubstaff makes it easy to generate professional-looking invoices quickly. You only need to set up a client once, and then you can choose them from the dropdown options when you’re creating every future invoice.

Here’s the best part: you can auto-generate line items by selecting the project, timeframe, and team members who should be included. You can include expenses and exclude non-billable time, as well.

When it’s time to send it out you can rest assured that your invoice is accurate and clear for your client.

Reports

This one is big.

Whether you love data or just want to check in on how things are going, these detailed time reports can help.

Hubstaff has over 17 different reports that are completely customizable. You can filter them by date, team member, project, and client. There’s also the option of scheduling reports to be sent to yourself, clients, or other stakeholders.

Here’s an overview of the reports you’ll have access to:

• General
  Stay updated on:
  • Time & activity per project or task
  • Weekly time worked, activity levels, and amounts earned
  • Apps & URLs used
  • Manual time edits made
  • Timesheet approvals
  • Expenses submitted
  • Work breaks
• Payments
  • View amounts owed and payments made on a team or individual level
• Budgets and limits
  • See what percentage of weekly and daily limits have been reached, and how much remaining project or client budget you have
• Time off
  • Check time off balances and transactions
• Invoice
  • Get an update on client and team invoices, including totals, paid, outstanding and past due
• Schedule
  • See completed, late, left early or missed shifts
• Job sites
  • See when team members arrived at or left Job sites

That’s the first part of better delegating: Understanding how much time and investment a project takes. Then you’ll know if you could outsource it to an expert for less time or budget. Time tracking tools help quantify this.

If you have a team, compare a similar project and its cost to see who is best suited for future initiatives. You can also audit your resources to identify which areas of expertise they’d like to improve.

Let’s look at an example. Maybe a member of your support team wants to improve their writing skills. You can assign them support articles to write, knowing that it might take more time and investment upfront.

But, once they’ve expanded their skill set, you now have a team member who can use their written communication skills with customers, and can draft articles from a customer-facing perspective.

By understanding where team members excel or want to grow, you can improve project outcomes and ensure you have the best skill-project fit.

Put together a process

Projects also fail when you don’t have the right workflows in place. Not only do you need a solid understanding of each team member’s role, but you also need a really firm grasp on how those roles fit together.

For example, which task hinges on another task? Which are independent of other tasks? Is there anything you’ve been doing at the beginning of the project that makes more sense to do at the end?

You might think these answers would be obvious. However, we tend to get caught up in a rush to get everything done and miss these areas for improvement.

To find them, you should take note of the exact times when your employees become less productive. For example, maybe you notice Jordan’s activity levels dip when you ask him to map out the user journey for a product.

When you bring this up to him, he tells you that he struggles to do this task without having clear user personas.

You decide to start working on the user personas earlier so they'll be ready by the time Jordan begins working.

Know which employees are the most efficient

Of course, not all employees perform equally. Quantifying your team members’ varying levels of efficiency is highly beneficial. You’ll be able to:

• Reward high performers
• Motivate average performers
• Train or reassign under-performers

A time tracking tool will tell you how long it takes different members of the team to complete comparable assignments. Maybe Marissa spends an hour writing homepage copy, while it takes Corey three hours to write the same copy.

You might also notice that Marissa’s copy comes back 90% of the way there, where Corey’s needs more editing and feedback. You can add the hours spent editing into your calculations, and it becomes even clearer that Marissa is the right fit for writing.

You can then ask Marissa to handle 90% of copywriting assignments.

Beyond time tracking reports, there are two widely used methods of tracking employee performance:

• Production counts (sales, keystrokes, units produced)
• Personnel data (work attendance, hours worked, absenteeism)

Both methods, while not foolproof, require some form of time tracking. Measuring production counts is only meaningful if there is time involved.

Hubstaff measures productivity by calculating activity levels for each employee. The software labels a user as active or inactive for every second of tracked time. If the user uses their mouse or keyboard, they’re labeled as active. If they don’t, they’re marked as inactive.

These numbers are added up to calculate an activity percentage for each 10-minute segment of tracked time.

For example, if someone uses their keyboard or mouse for 5 minutes in a 10-minute period, their activity level would be 50% percent.

Note that activity rates can vary widely based on that person’s role. Team members who handle data entry will naturally have higher activity rates than those who spend a lot of time on video calls.

Setting a baseline

Baselines are fairly easy to develop when you’ve got a group of people doing the same thing.
But how can you establish a baseline when team members are doing different types of work?

First, you can compare current performance to past performance. Maybe one of your employees has historically produced two designs per day. Now, she’s averaging 2.5. Obviously, this positive increase says her productivity is improving.

The second way to establish productivity baselines.

One way to do this is with Hubstaff’s achievement badges.

These are a great way to encourage team members to do their best work. Badges can help foster healthy competition and motivate team members to hit their assigned metrics.

Some possible achievements to strive for are:

• Efficiency pro – Given to team members who meet their activity goals every day.
• Productivity champ – Awarded to team members who complete their weekly to-dos goal.
• Time hero – Given to those team members that meet the number of work hours they should aim for every week.

If you want a birds-eye view of these metrics, activity levels are color-coded: all you have to do is glance at your dashboard.

You can also see:

• Who’s online
• When each person last logged in
• Average activity level per session
• Total time logged per week

Absenteeism and attendance will tell you how dependable team members are.

This feature is especially important if you’re managing a remote team. It’s easy to lose track of each employee’s work day when everyone is going by different time zones and schedules.

Incentivizing your team members

After you’ve established baselines, separate your team members into three categories:

• High performers
• Average performers
• Under-performers

This will help you better motivate and support each person individually.

High performers

92% of employees say they feel more engaged when recognition is part of a company’s culture.

Try to recognize the contributions your high achievers are making with positive feedback.

Delivering praise is even more important when you’re working with freelancers. Freelancers score as high or higher than traditional employees on engagement and satisfaction. The only exception is when it comes to commitment.

"Independent workers are more likely to think about finding another client, even when the arrangement with their current primary client is expected to be long-term," Rohman writes.

To boost their commitment, make sure you recognize your freelance hires as well as full-time staff.

Average performers

You need to work with your average performers to help them improve their performance.

Try scheduling individual meetings with these professionals to discuss their work and goals.

You might say, “(Name), I wanted to talk to you today because your activity levels are 10-20% lower than others on the team. How can I help you boost that percentage?” Offer examples of time management techniques they can try, and aim to understand their working process.

In addition, use clear metrics to motivate your team members.

For example, you could say, “Right now, most of the blog posts you’re submitting have around seven errors. It takes our copywriter some time to find these errors and correct them, so I’d like to see tighter drafts. Let’s get that average number of errors down to two or less per post.”

Some employees might need more direct, quantitative feedback like this. Others will need ongoing positive reinforcement. Your approach will depend on the team member and what motivates them.

Low performers

Decide whether to let go of your worst performers or invest resources in bringing them up to speed.

Paul Laherty, the vice president of Diio, poses two questions to help you make this choice:

• Have you given this person clear expectations of their responsibilities and expected output?
• Have you provided feedback about their performance?

If you don’t respond yes to both questions, then it’s probably not entirely this employee’s fault their work hasn’t been up to your standards, because you haven’t defined those standards.

But if you do answer yes, Laherty says to ask yourself a final question: Would you keep this person if they turned around their performance?

Decide whether or not to work with them based on your reply.