Want to One up Competitors? These 3 Time Tracking Benefits Will Get You There

Do you dare to outperform the competition? 

Standing out in a crowded niche is hard. To beat your business competitors, you’ll need to better use your 2 most valuable resources — time and talent. 

The easiest way to do this is by introducing efficient time tracking to your business.

Accurate time estimates open the door to many competitive advantages — read on to learn about the top 3 benefits of recording your employees’ time. 

#1: You’ll increase productivity

According to new McKinsey research, up to 53% of employees at a given company face productivity issues, significantly slowing business growth. 

Turning your underachievers into high performers gives you a major competitive advantage. But you’ll need certain insights first — like how each employee spends their work hours. 

With precise time tracking, you can quickly notice when you’re not using resources efficiently — including human resources.

To receive detailed, up-to-date insights into staff schedules and assignments, use an automated time tracking tool like Clockify. 

Clockify’s Team Dashboard provides a clear, real-time overview of:

• Daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly breakdowns of all employee activities,
• Current assignments of every team member, and
• All company projects or clients and the time spent on each one.

Now, with the actionable insights Clockify gives you, you’ll easily be able to: 

1. Single out the least and most effective team members,
2. Reach out to the underperformers to help them improve,
3. Reward the overachievers and incentivize everyone to do better, and
4. Reshuffle assignments to even the workload and avoid burnout.

#2: You’ll get data you can use to improve client relationships 

How often do you lose a client or get a bad review due to a disputed invoice? 

Executive consultant Finn Wheatley states that it happened all the time earlier in his career — that’s before he introduced time tracking to his business:

“Early on in my consulting practice, I spent far too much time putting out small fires for clients instead of focusing on big-picture strategy. Invoices led to disagreements because it wasn’t clear how I arrived at my figures. Tracking the hours I spent on each project provided an ‘Aha!’ moment — it showed where I could optimize my process to avoid frustrations.”

Client disagreements happen to every business at some point. But still, your aim should be to reduce invoice disputes to maintain your reputation and an edge over the competition. 

Besides improving productivity, a project time tracker like Clockify helps you prevent invoice disputes forever. 

In a dispute, you can use Clockify to show clients how you spent their budget in great detail. To this end, Clockify automatically generates in-depth time reports, including:

1. Summary reports — showing which employees worked for the client, 
2. Detailed reports — showing which tasks were performed for the client at a particular time, 
3. Weekly reports — showing a breakdown of services provided in specific weeks, and
4. Assignment reports — showing the difference between estimates and actual time spent on tasks.

You can export and share each of these reports with clients, allowing them to see where each penny from their budget is spent. 

Such complete transparency reduces the risk of clients accusing you of overbilling and other disputes. Furthermore, it’s hard to argue with meticulous time logs because they show how each billable hour was used.  

With the Standard pricing plan, Clockify lets you generate invoices directly from tracked billable hours, further simplifying the billing process. 

#3: You’ll estimate costs accurately

According to How Big Things Get Done, over 90% of all projects go over budget,  sometimes ruining the companies behind them. 

With precise cost estimates, you can avoid ballooning expenses that often sink similar enterprises — providing your business with a huge competitive advantage. 

Besides reducing the risk of failure, cost estimates are also useful for:

• Allocating resources with maximum efficiency, and 
• Managing client expectations. 

To predict expenses more accurately, you can use Clockify as a project forecasting tool. 

After creating a project in Clockify, simply:

1. Set your budget limit,
2. Enter the estimated completion time, and
3. Schedule individual assignments. 

Based on this info and your staff’s hourly rate, Clockify can generate a project forecast. 

This handy graph lets you track project progress at a glance and see if you’re on budget and schedule. 

You can also set up alerts that notify employees when a project edges close to an estimate.  

As a result, you’ll always be able to react on time and assign additional staff to the project or adjust expectations of clients.

In the long run, Clockify’s accurate forecasts can:

• Establish your business as a reliable service provider, and
• Show which clients are the most profitable based on billable hours. 

Build a more efficient business with Clockify

Time tracking can help you boost your bottom line by: 

• Improving your staff’s productivity,
• Increasing client satisfaction, and 
• Predicting costs more accurately.

You can achieve all of this with Clockify, without any previous experience with time tracking tools or project scheduling software. 

The platform packs plenty of powerful features into an easy-to-use, intuitive interface that you can master quickly. All users also get free access to:

1. Collection of in-depth video tutorials, 
2. Detailed Help section with articles explaining every feature, 
3. Customer support via email, phone, and live chat.

And if you really want to outshine your competitors, try using Clockify with two more products to improve your day-to-day operations even more. Apart from Clockify, a time tracking app, incorporate a team chat and project management app into your business at a special bundle price. Optimizing your business for stable growth has never been easier.