Time Tracking

So, in my business, I realized that we needed to create some greater efficiencies. We typically just keep track manually of how much time we spend, but in order to improve, we need to track what we do. 

I decided to sign up for an online time card service at TSheets. I went to tsheets.com and started to sign up for their service because a friend of mine handles their marketing.

Incidentally, he has been trying to get me to write a blog post about it for a month now. I haven't because I don't want to write about anything until I have tried it. It wasn't until yesterday that I finally decided that I could probably use the service.

The issue is that I have in my business is that everything is virtual. All of my employees are scattered, do their own thing, and then report back to me what was done and how much time it took. Usually the response is something like, "Well, I lost the piece of paper I was tracking my time on, but I think I spent about 15 hours."

We couldn't improve without knowing how our time was spent or even really how much time we spent doing it. I couldn't really make any appropriate people management, business management or financial management decisions without knowing those things. (Now there are some other things we did to track that I will blog about in a few days, they are very cool.)

I signed up at tsheets.com and set up and account. (Full disclosure... if you click on my link and sign up, I get some sort of credit on their affiliate program.... but I still think the service is pretty cool whether you get me the credit or not.)

I postponed my set up because I figured it was going to take forever. Finally, I decided to do it. No credit card required to set up the free 30-day trial. Took me about 3 minutes to get my account set up. No guess work. But, what I really thought was most impressive was after my account was set up, I was prompted with this:

I could have someone just call me and walk me through it. They understand that people want to communicate differently. They give me the option of how to set up my service... all this and they don't even have my credit card information so they can't bill me by "accident." I chose the "guide me" option and about 3 minutes later, my team was set up, my job codes entered and I was good to go. Here are some of the options that I thought were really cool for just about any business. You can choose if you want these features on or off by employee or group.

• Clock in and out from a mobile web browser
• See who's working right now
• View Timesheet
• Manage Timesheet
• Require to login from a specific computer (e.g. the receptionist can only log in from her own computer)
• Use job codes (I really like this one because now I can see project by project what is being worked on)

It is really cool. If you work by yourself, they have a free limited, personal edition that you can use. I highly recommend it. Their pricing is great, so if you are a large organization, you really should try it instead of a timeclock or timesheets. You can export the data for auto import into your accounting software and it even manages paid time off... it is pretty darn cool.

Oh, I had to contact tech support because of something I didn't want to figure out through their FAQs or Wiki, so I used their online chat. Very helpful and friendly.