Why You Should Be Tracking All of Your Time Whether You Plan to Bill for it or Not!
@minutedock
Bryce Armstrong, Customer Success Manager, MinuteDock Bryce is dipping his toes into the cloud-based accounting ecosystem after recently partnering up with his brother Jared, founder of MinuteDock: time management software for professional services.
The team from MinuteDock put forward an argument for tracking billable and non-billable time to get the most out of your time tracking service...
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t’s a common misconception when people start using time tracking software: the idea that we should only bother tracking the hours we mean to actually charge the client for. But it’s important to consider whether keeping track of your non-billable hours might be worthwhile. In fact, you might well discover that tracking all of your work hours during a given day is highly worthwhile. Understanding how much of your workday is getting used for certain non-billable tasks, such as staff meetings, will let you identify areas where you might be using an inefficient process. It’s hugely valuable to gain an in-depth understanding of which parts of your workday are actually generating income for your business. Knowing how you are spending billable and non-billable time is the first step to streamlining your work processes and making every moment count towards your business success. Knowing how many non-billable hours are being put towards clients will allow you to identify the kinds of clients who require more of that time, allowing you to make prudent decisions around the value of a given product to your business. You might find that a particular type of project would be better billed at a fixed price to better reflect the 44 / Issue 25
overall work and effort put in by your team.
also digitize your documentation whenever possible to make finding what you need as easy as possible.
Recording all the hours you work, whether you bill them or not, will let But why track time at all? Your key performance indicators in many you identify work hours which you industries will perhaps should be billing include meeting for, but currently aren’t. deadlines, It’s important to the “Ultimately, regardless making sure all long-term health of your profession, the hours are billed, of any business time you spend working and identifying to make sure is a valuable and finite profitable that your resource. Don’t make the service areas. work is being Time tracking appropriately mistake of wasting it by increases compensated. not knowing exactly where productivity by it is being spent!” making it clear Keeping good track where time is being of your time will help spent throughout the day. you to figure out where The identification of time spent you may be wasting it! You will be on non-billable work is massively able to identify those non-billable valuable for determining what tasks tasks which might be taking up more of your time than they should, can be outsourced. and make appropriate changes to Ultimately, regardless of your streamline those processes. profession, the time you spend working is a valuable and finite It’s only natural to prefer to be resource. Don’t make the mistake spending your time on work which of wasting it by not knowing exactly you will actually charge for. So where it is being spent! how do we try to minimize the number of non-billable hours we accumulate, without sacrificing the benefits that those hours can provide? One good trick is to try to use as much automation in your FIND OUT MORE... non-billable processes as you can. Reducing the administrative Check out other MinuteDock workload, for example by making stories at: payment reminders automated, > minutedock.com/academy can be a huge time saver. You can XU Magazine - the independent magazine for Xero users, by Xero users.
