Time tracking is not a new concept. Throughout history, it’s been used by businesses and individuals to control their work and personal time, manage tasks with greater efficiency, focus on essential things, and become more productive.
Plenty of different time tracking methods and techniques exist today, from something as simple as paper cards to complex activity monitoring systems. Each of them has its own merits, flaws, and kinks, which can be confusing for those who just start to explore time tracking.
To bring more clarity on this matter, we talked to Arina Katrycheva, the Chief Marketing Officer at actiTIME Inc., a company with more than a decade of experience in time tracking. We asked her about the purposes and benefits of this practice, as well as the methods one can use to track their work hours more efficiently.
Q: Could you please tell us about actiTIME?
actiTIME is a timesheet tool with some practical project management features. It enables users to plan and control the work scope by creating projects and tasks, editing them, and assigning to responsible team members. You can also apply actiTIME to set and track time estimates against actual time expenses or add information on billing and cost rates to different tasks to oversee your projects’ budgets.
actiTIME does even more than that. It is in handy when you want to get an insight into:
- Team productivity,
- Overtime statistics,
- PTO trends,
- Employee earnings,
- Total revenues and expenses.
Besides, our product can help you streamline anything from payroll calculation to employee leave management. For instance, if you run a project for a client and charge them per hour of service, actiTIME will automatically generate an invoice for you.
Overall, actiTIME lets users increase process efficiency and obtain a wide range of useful data just by logging their work hours daily. With our tool, business owners and managers can answer the most critical questions about their business: How effectively do we work? Is everything going according to the plan? How much did we spend and earn? And so on.
This is what makes actiTIME so valuable.
Q: It looks like actiTIME fulfills quite many functions all at once. But who does need it? Who are your key customers?
Time tracking data and the features I described above are beneficial for everyone who aspires to be productive and efficient. It doesn’t matter if you work alone or as part of a large team, if you’re client-oriented or simply have a need to estimate internal resources more accurately. Each business aims to be profitable, effective, and capable of tracking its performance progress well, regardless of whether it carries out only small-scale projects or strives to meet very ambitious and hard-to-attain goals.
Our client profile is highly diverse and includes solo entrepreneurs, small companies, not-for-profit organizations, and massive corporations. They all use actiTIME because it helps them stay in the know of what’s going on and informs them to make smarter management decisions.
Q: It’s obvious that time tracking can play a role in a company’s success. But how difficult is it to integrate the practice of time tracking into your work routine?
It’s very simple. actiTIME may seem difficult to implement because it has extensive functionality. However, it’s a very straightforward and flexible product that isn’t hard to configure and apply at all.
You can switch on or off some of the actiTIME features that you don’t plan to use. For example, if you don’t need to calculate PTO balance for your team members, you can easily turn off this functionality and return to it once the necessity arises. Such a flexible configuration differentiates our product from its major competitors in the market and fosters a distraction-free and ergonomic user experience.
With that said, it might take you up to several days to tune actiTIME in a way that satisfies all your management needs ideally. And we always support our clients during this process in case they call for assistance. Most importantly, we encourage our users to think about which objectives they want to achieve with actiTIME since there’s no point in tracking work hours just for the sake of it. Time tracking works best when applied purposefully to solve the issues that concern you most.
Q: Many people don’t like digital time tracking tools believing that managers can use this kind of software for constant surveillance and excessive control over everything employees do throughout the day. So how can an employer persuade their team that time tracking, in fact, is good for everyone in the company?
Indeed, some people have negative attitudes towards time trackers. This is particularly true for those software products that monitor users’ screen-time activities, register which websites they visit, and make random screenshots of their workstations. Nevertheless, not all time trackers try to record everything you do on your computer, and definitely not actiTIME.
When using our tool, users just make time entries in their timesheets manually or track work hours automatically with the browser extension or the mobile app. Of course, you won’t be able to track time with a millisecond precision and control every minute of your employees’ workday this way, but actiTIME is an excellent option for the companies where staff members trust each other.
Moreover, when trying to integrate time tracking into their company’s work routine, a manager should explain the goals of this practice to their employees. It’s important to tell them clearly why you decided to implement a time tracker in the first place and why it’s crucial to track working hours accurately. For instance, if you say that you need time tracking in order to bill clients correctly since you suspect that the business spends more money than it earns, I doubt that anybody will resist the change you want to introduce.
Q: What do you think about the future of time tracking software? Will the current rise in the number of telecommuting employees affect the demand for time trackers somehow?
I think that there always will be companies that need data to make the right decisions. And of course, as the remote work trend increases, this need is going to grow even more compelling.
When employees are working from home or any other place outside their regular office environment, it’s more challenging for team leaders to stay aware of individual performance progress. But a time tracker provides a real-time picture of the team’s workloads, and lets better see how the work on tasks and projects is going at any moment. Hence, applying a time tracker like actiTIME in the context of remote work surely provides enormous advantages for any WFH team that wants to show excellent results.
Q: For our readers who decide in favor of time tracking and actiTIME, how can they start to use it?
Anyone can register for a free trial here, and if you need some help with configuring actiTIME, you may always reach out – we’ll be more than glad to assist.
We also have a very special offer for those who plan to utilize our product alone, with one business partner or in a team of three. For them, actiTIME is available forever for free even after the trial period.