When you run a small business with even just a few employees, accurately measuring total worker hours, especially time spent on billable work, is crucial to your financial success. While it may be easy to track time with paper forms or a generic spreadsheet when you have just one or two employees, as you grow you should invest in timesheet software. If you have reservations about spending funds on a time reporting program, consider more info and the following reasons why you should not hesitate in making the purchase.

No More Paper and Unwieldy Spreadsheets

If you require employees to fill out time cards with details about their hours worked, you have to contend with archiving paperwork or secure disposal of documents that contain sensitive employee data. Plus, the cost of paper for timesheets adds to your operating costs.

In addition, if you use a generic spreadsheet program to compile work hours, you may have to find creative ways to make the spreadsheet fit your exact timekeeping needs such a creating custom macros for tracking certain types of billable tasks.

If you purchase timesheet software, you can have a paperless system that will enable you to provide each employee with an account to log in and enter their overall hours as well as time spent on specific tasks.

Increased Productivity

Obtaining a bird's eye view of how your employee's spend their time and seeing what activities generate the most to your bottom line can be a tedious chore if you rely on paper timesheets or a simply formatted spreadsheet for compiling data.

However, you can choose from multi-platform software programs that provide instant reports that can tell you how much each employee spends on certain tasks, how many times someone has been late in a month and who generates the most billable work.

When you can generate reports tailored to your needs, you can use the easy-to-read data to help increase your productivity. You can reassign workers to more productive tasks and keep track of how much of your payroll budget goes to overtime within a set time frame. The data you glean from reports can also help you schedule flex time and shifts.

Less Hassle for Payroll

If you dread gathering data from timesheets for hourly workers or reminding employees to get their timesheets turned in on time, you can rid yourself of these annoyances once you install a timesheet program on your office computer.

Some software programs that are specifically designed for time reporting can provide you with automatic calculations of employee time that you can seamlessly export to submit to your payroll processing company or use for preparing payroll checks in-house.

Features of some timesheet programs also include tools that enable you to send alerts to employees to remind them to fill out their computerized timesheets on time. This can save you time as you will not have to go around the office reminding people to submit their hours. Your workers will get paid on time and you will not have to deal with discrepancies in your weekly or bi-weekly payroll due to missing data.

No Monthly Payments or Service Fee Increases for Software

If you already use a time tracking tool such as a web-based program offered by a third-party, you probably have to pay monthly fee for the service. In addition, some web-based services charge additional fees for each employee you add to your account. As you grow, these fees will begin to add up.

Furthermore, if the vendor's system has downtime or if you experience an Internet outage, you will not be able to access your payroll system.

Privacy and security may also be a concern. It may be more reassuring to have your employee data in-house instead of on someone else's service. Even major corporations can be vulnerable when they use third-party vendors to store data online.

If you want to control costs, purchase a standalone time reporting program that you can install on your own computers. Some software companies will even provide technical support to help you install the time tracking software on your firm's computers.