The importance of itemized time tracking for project-orientated organizations

The saying ‘time is money’ is particularly relevant for project-orientated organizations. Is your budget on track? Employee payroll is a major line item, but employees are also a key source of profit generation. Itemized time tracking is essential in a project-focused company, and your HRMS is a means of easily managing your time and scheduling activities.

1. Future time forecasting depends on accurate data

Many companies sell goods and services that are heavily dependent upon the efforts of their employees. In some cases, the business model has the employee based at a customer site full-time, so it is critical to understand how much the customer is paying for that employee’s time vs. the total salary expense. Understanding work hours and effort is crucial for management and sales teams as they make estimates for future contracts. It is not enough to know a headcount and each employee’s average hourly rate; detailed data is needed. This is where an HRMS with itemized time tracking capabilities can help.

Past itemized time tracking can help a project manager hit the ground running on future projects once the deal is sold. Using the time tracking HRMS data, the project manager can use current employee job profiles and skills to plan for the new project by reviewing the actual time spent and then staffing up or down appropriately.

Recommended Reading: HRMS Software Guide - Find an HRMS with itemized time tracking capabilities

2. Your HRMS can highlight resource gaps in advance and help to solve them

Your HRMS should be a ‘one-stop shop’ for all time-related activities. It can be used for general employee scheduling by shift as well as displaying employee unavailability due to vacation or training. When an employee is tracking time at a task level, it is easy to measure the time taken over a specific period, as well as highlighting future gaps where a specific employee will be unavailable.

I have seen this HRMS data utilized heavily in global firms. Often a local manager or HR professional will only know staff in their location, so when a gap arises it involves phone calls or emails to borrow a resource or pay for a temp. Using the HRMS with itemized time tracking, an HR professional can now search for a profile in another location that logs similar hours on comparable tasks in order to find a replacement.

3. Itemized time tracking helps you to maximize profits

When you use itemized time tracking in your HRMS at the task level, you are able to model scenarios to maximize profits. If two employees can perform the same assignment, the higher cost one can be allocated to an area of more responsibility, thus generating more revenue. Itemized time tracking data from the HRMS can also be utilized by other parts of the organization-such as Six Sigma or continuous improvement teams-to increase profits by eliminating waste such as duplicate or redundant tasks.