How To Get Employees To Use Time Tracking Software

If you’re a service business who bills hourly than tracking time on client projects is hugely important to keeping your business alive.

Time tracked = time billed to clients = cash flow.

The problem is people especially employees do not like to be held accountable. It’s human nature to avoid attempts at accountability. Companies like WeightWatchers have made businesses from just helping people stay accountable.

As manager or business owner you have two ways to get your employees to properly track their time. Incentivize or Punish… both paths start with a goal. Example: all designers must bill at least 31 hours per week.

Negative repercussions means if they DO NOT bill 31 hours something negative happens to them.

Positive repercussions or incentivizing means if they DO bill 31 hours something positive happens for them.

Negative Repercussions for NOT tracking time

• Clean out the office refrigerator.
• Clean the office bathrooms.
• Missed free company lunch.
• Don’t get the friday afternoon half day off.
• Time tracking is a requirement, if you don’t do it, you get fired.

Incentivizing Employees for tracking time

• Free lunch friday
• Free monthly movie tickets
• Half day off on a friday
• T-Shirt gift-card to Threadless.com

Time Tracking Software Options

• Microsoft Excel - You can use excel to track time, this is rather archaic and doesn’t streamline your billing process. But here’s a way you could use excel to track itme.
• Cashboard - this is a great app that allows you to handle time tracking plus other basic bookkeeping tasks like invoicing.
• LessTimeSpent - of course we’re going to recommend our own app, it’s really bad ass, check it out.
• TSheets - tsheets seems to be the leader in the industry for time tracking on large entreprise teams.
• Freckle - Freckle is known as “Friendly Online Time Tracking Software”, funky colors and great design makes freckle a solid choice.