Productivity | 4 min read

Why Does the World Need Timesheets?

By AllActivity
17.01.2022

As a business, you are well advised to keep track of how your employees use their time on your payroll. That’s because If you make monthly payments in exchange for someone else’s time, you can easily get screwed. Those who owe you their services – an office worker, a teacher, your gardener – is typically only required to show up, rather than produce actual results.

To conquer this dilemma, employers invented the timesheet. In its most basic form, it’s a table with two columns: one listing agreed-upon intervals during the work day, e.g., 9-10, 10-11, and the other describing what the person actually worked on.

In order to choose the best time tracking tool for your organization, understand there’s a right and a wrong way to use timesheets:

Getting Timesheets Wrong

Timesheets should not be used primarily to monitor unproductive employees. If that’s your concern, you have bigger problems, Hire better!

Getting Timesheets Right

In order to maximize the value of timesheets, use them to help the entire team. If you open your mind towards improving the work experience for everyone, you will find that – beyond productivity – you can gain valuable insights and generate actionable in lots of other areas, such as:

Employee’s experience and happiness
Lifestyle and Health
Financial metrics
Pricing and Billing
Strategy and Automation

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With these goals in mind, here’s the definitive list of features to look for in a timetracking tool.

Automation

In 2022, there is no excuse for manual timesheets. But don’t be fooled by software that claims to automate your timekeeping. Most timetracking tools out there will get you:

- Online forms that your team must fill in; or
- at best, stopwatches that likewise need to be handled manually by employees.

What you are really looking for is 100% automation with zero manual input reuired for the tracking process. With Allactivity Automated tracking, you will get:

Granularity. This means the level of detail in your tracked activity data is far higher than with any form of manual tracking.
Continuity. No activity will ever be lost – whereas with manual timesheets, up to 33% of activites are lost
Accuracy. Your time are not only complete but, in fact, correct. Conversely, manual timesheets are extremely error-prone when it comes to recording what happened.

Privacy Safeguards

With full automation comes great responsibility. For legal reasons alone (in Europe and beyond), you absolutely need a tool that respects your team’s privacy.

A good timetracking tool will offer safeguards against privacy infringement without affecting the quality of your data. A great tool can even leverage the technical solution to protectin personal data for the benefit of even better insights.

Quality of Tracked Data

Perhaps the most important thing to consider in choosing a timetracking tool is the quality of data it delivers. Basically, while a million times faster and 2,000 times more granular than manual timesheets, most automated tracking tools will only get you dumb data: A long list of activities with no connection to your actual business processes.

The feature you should be interested in is the tool’s ability to (semi-)automatically assign tracked activities to your organization’s projects, departments, or teams. Only then will you be able to fully leverage the limitless power of automated activity tracking for purposes of Task Mining.

Actionability & Business Value

With so many timetracking tools available, It is crucial to ask what business value it actually generates for your organization. Keeping the purpose of timesheets in mind there’s basically three categories into which available software can be classified:

Average apps: Most automated timetrackers are able to track who is actually “at work”, either at home or in the office. It’s a basic feature and some tools that are limited to that feature are even available for free.
Good apps: Makes it easy to assign tracked activities to projects or departments. That is certainly valuable and allows for a significant, yet still limited, degree of insight into your team’s workflows. (For professional services firms, the added benefit is often an easy way to bill clients.)
Great apps: The best timetracking tools go far beyond simple activity tracking. Tools like AllActivity will not only create flawless record of all digital workflows. In addition, the recorded data is automatically analyzed for a variety of metrics, including team productivity, employee experience, quality of tools used or potential for automation.

Dashboards with clear insights into work activities, in combination with automated recommmendations for action, can unleash the full power of task mining for any organization. With promised savings up to 40% on payroll costs, such tools may be a bit more expensive than the most basic form of timetrackers, but will pay for themselves in no time at all.

Ease of use

The more features an activity tracker or task mining tool offers, the more difficult it often is to roll it out in your business. Certain process mining software, such as Celonis, is so complicated to implement and use day-to-day that a self-service solution for small and medium businesses is not available at all.

Our best tip is therefore to look for software that is also – or exclusively – available as a self-service solution. This essentially guarantees that the makers of that software have thought long and hard about the user experience and your entire team will enjoy engaging with that tool. And that, of course, is essential for tool adoption in any organization.

At this point, it is quite clear what are the features you have to watch for when choosing a Timetracking Tool.

We have created an overview table which will allow you to compare – at a glance – timetracking and Allactivity.

	AllActivity	Microsoft Viva	Activtrak	Rescue Time	Celonis	Chrometa
Ease of usage
Task mining
Free trial/pricing
Privacy
Provides solution

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What you should do now

Whenever you’re ready…here are 4 ways we can help you increase your productivity, lifestyle & health by embracing automation:

Claim your AllActivity Software Demo. Ask for a complete 2-month free trial and start achieving better results from the beginning!

If you’d like to learn how automation and task mining can take your team or organization to the next level, go to our blog or visit our Task Mining section, where you can find our lifestyle calculator and find out how to be more efficient!
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