Most businesses fail because they don’t recognize the importance of time tracking.
Whether you are an executive or a regular team member, knowing where your time is being spent is crucial.
Time tracking is key to actionable insights that can result in increased productivity and a healthy workflow. You can easily identify which task takes most of your time and reflect if the time spent on a project is justified.
According to research by McKinsey Global Institute, time tracking software can improve productivity by 30%.
Luckily, there are many time management software available in the market. However, the main challenge lies in choosing the one that fits rights into your business requirements. Moreover, researching the best time management software can be quite boring, too.
You need to get through demos, tools comparisons, and reviews that can last for weeks.
While these are essential steps to selecting the right tool, it shouldn’t consume much of your time. There are various factors such as employee oversight, customization, and price that bear equal importance when buying the system.
1. Requirements
The foremost thing is to identify the problems you are trying to solve with a time management tool. You need to ask if the time tracker tools will actually reduce your admin burden or not.
Does the system give out an accurate record of your time?
The main goal of using a time management solution is to simplify your team’s time tracking and provide you insights into your project. It removes the need to manually track time altogether.
If your end goal is to get accurate data above everything, choose an automatic time tracker instead of the one that requires you to input something.
Besides, you will find both standalone time tracking software as well as an integrated one. The integrated tool comes as an overarching part of the project management suite or you can go for the one that does little more than just registering, tracking, and billing for the time worked.
Some good examples of integrated time management software are Zoho projects, Wrike, and more. They have a quality time tracking built-in.
2. Integration and Extension
The best time management software will work well in coordination with your other existing systems. The system should easily fit into your standard workflow and seamlessly integrate with other work applications.
Integration is particularly important as 1) it helps with easy sharing of data between applications 2) it helps expand the application functionality without having to upgrade to a new software. For instance, you might want to integrate your billing software with the new time management software.
While selecting, run the demo version and see how you interact with the tool. Is the navigation complicated? Do you have to hunt for information?
Having a rich and intuitive interface is a necessity as it makes sure that every piece of information is easily accessible. Besides, it makes it easy to get data out of the tool.
That’s why always ask vendors if their tools integrate with third-party applications. You can either go for organic integration whereby you pick a best time tracking software like Zoho Projects and can get easy access to their entire software ecosystem.
Or, you can go for an open-source time management tool that offers an open API (application programming interface). It means your in-house development team can build integration with other third-party applications with the open API tool.
3. Employee Privacy Protection
You don’t want to bring in time management software that undermines your work environment. You want a tool that fits your company culture.
Many solutions go above and beyond to monitor employees when and where they are working. In fact, some tools let you record screenshots while employees are on the clock. These tools can also record a log of keyboard and mouse activities during shifts.
The idea of tracking already makes employees uncomfortable as they feel their privacy gets violated. That’s why you need to be careful about choosing time management software that doesn’t act as an invasive employee monitoring tool.
Ask each vendor how the tool uses each individual’s tracked data. Is the employee data protected until you choose to share it? And most importantly, who has access to what data?
When using any kind of software, the security of data can’t be compromised.
4. Pricing and Plan
Price is an important decision factor, but it heavily depends on the features you need.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the more functionality you get, the more you have to pay. Plus, you don’t want to pay for a ton of features you don’t need, and at the same time, if you have important features missing from the tool, it might not be a good investment.
Check out the different pricing plans and the features it offers. Many vendors even provide bespoke solutions to fit your business’s unique needs. These SaaS-based solution packages are generally charged based on the number of users and the features required.
In a nutshell, you need to first prioritize the functionalities you need and set a budget amount aside. It shouldn’t burn a hole in your pocket.
5. Vendors Reputation
This might not seem like an important buying factor, but trust me, the vendor reputation is very important. You don’t want to deal with a vendor who doesn’t carry a good reputation.
Check out for reviews online and read their existing customer’s testimonials. You should even ask vendors for their old clients’ contact details so that you can talk to them and learn about their experience with the tool as well as the vendor.
Even after the installation of the time management software, you will constantly require your vendor’s support for software updates and maintenance.
Wrap Up
Who is going to actually use the time management software in your organization?
Once you have shortlisted two to three best time management software, you need to get buy-in from your employees who will use this software.
Open up a discussion with your team, get their feedback, and understand if the tool will be able to solve their pain points.
They should be comfortable using the software, so make sure that they get proper training on how to use the program.
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