So, your team’s working from home. You’ve established a remote working policy and you’ve set up their devices.
But how on earth do you calculate their billable hours efficiently?
When you’re not all in the same office building, it’s tricky to capture billed hours cohesively. If you don’t track time correctly, you could risk miscalculating your hours.
For financial firms, this could result in you overcharging or (more likely) undercharging your clients.
So, what’s the solution?
Transform time-tracking with tech
Did you know that companies who invest in time tracking software are 44 percent less likely to make errors?
When your team works from home, accumulating disparate documents can be a time-consuming task. Not to mention the fact that paper timesheets, or scanned documents, can easily get lost.
So, when it comes to tracking your billable hours remotely, the further you lean into collaborative technology, the better.
With that in mind, here are three products your remote firm might want to put to the test.
1. Office 365 Timesheets
If you spend most of your ‘remote’ working life managing your projects in Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365 Timesheets is for you.
This free app integrates with your SharePoint environment and allows your employees to track their billable hours on established individual tasks and projects. Once filled in and submitted, the applicable account managers can review and approve the timesheets.
To make the process as accurate as possible, employees can fill out their daily hours in their own time and then submit their timesheets weekly.
2. Toggl
Toggl takes into consideration the flexibility of rates and experience levels, helping you tailor billable hours to your unique, changing needs.
Ultimately, the product allows you to:
- Separate billable hours from your unpaid hours. Allowing you to track unpaid work, such as answering emails, without overcharging your clients.
- Calculate different rates for different clients, projects or tasks.
- Assign different hourly rates for different employees, according to their role and experience.
- Calculate one-off project rates.
- Track your overall billable hours, productivity levels and profits.
3. Clockify
Clockify is an intuitive time tracking application for your remote teams. Unlike other time tracking software, you can host an unlimited number of users for free, forever.
On top of logging and categorising billable hours, Clockify lets you track user activity and create sharable reports. This lets your firm measure your productivity rates, as well as expected client charges.
Conveniently, you can integrate Clockify with your Microsoft Teams project management environment to help align your timesheets with your project work.
Improve your billable hours, remotely
When calculating your overall billable hours, one small mistake could cause big repercussions for your finances and clients.
In order to keep your remote teams productive and ensure your billable hours are accurate, it’s essential you invest in an intuitive time-tracking tool.
We’ve offered three options for your firm to investigate. If you try any out, please let us know how you get on and whether you recommend any of the tools. And, if you require more help to streamline your remote operations, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Find out more about how we found the shift to remote working by watching our webinar here.
