Many business owners underestimate the importance of tracking employee hours. When you don’t know how much time your team spends on tasks and projects, you can quickly lose track of productivity and profitability. What if you discovered that a particular client or project was taking up a third of your team’s time but weren’t billing enough to cover that cost? Performing regular time audits can help you get a handle on this situation. If you’re wondering how to do a time audit, the first step is tracking employee hours effectively. This article will outline the best ways to track employee hours to help you confidently tackle an upcoming time audit.
Automatic time-tracking software, like Tackle, makes it easy to track employee hours so you can get back to business. With Tackle, your employees can automatically track their time on different tasks and projects without remembering to clock in and out. This not only provides accurate data for your next time audit but also boosts productivity and morale.
8 Best Ways To Track Employee Hours
1. Time Tracking Software: The Accurate Way to Record Hours Worked
Time tracking software records the time employees spend on various tasks and projects. These tools provide a systemic approach to tracking work hours, giving businesses insights into employee productivity and resource utilization.
These tools are valuable for strategic decision-making and performance optimization. By analyzing the data generated by employee time-tracking apps, managers can identify trends and bottlenecks in processes, paving the way for workflow enhancements.
Pros of Time Tracking Software
- Record Accuracy: Time tracking software eliminates the margin for error associated with manual timesheets. This ensures precise recording of work hours, leaving no room for billing errors while eliminating time spent filling out timesheets.
- Productivity Analytics: Some time trackers have built-in reporting and analytics capabilities, giving you deep insights into employee work patterns. You’ll know when your team is at the top of their game or if something hinders them from working at their best.
- Payroll Capabilities: You can set hourly rates for employees, automating the calculation of employee wages. Some tools also integrate with payroll platforms, enabling you to send payments to salaried or hourly employees.
Cons of Time Tracking Software
- Onboarding and Training. While time tracking offers significant benefits, achieving them is difficult without proper onboarding. The initial setup phase may consume considerable time, particularly for larger teams.
- Privacy Concerns. Some employees may perceive tracking time as invasive, raising concerns about privacy in the workplace. Managers must communicate their time-tracking goals and be honest about what they expect from their employees.
2. Spreadsheets: An Old-Fashioned Approach to Time Tracking
You can use Excel spreadsheets to track time spent on multiple projects by your teams. Digital spreadsheets offer great benefits for entrepreneurs. Building a template allows for quick reuse on various tasks, and your documents can be safely kept for future reference.
This data can also help you to prepare and generate valuable reports. Using spreadsheets for time tracking can be helpful; however, it can take a lot of time to manually input all the necessary information.
Pros
- Customizable: Spreadsheets allow for detailed tracking tailored to specific needs and workflows.
- Data Organization: They provide a structured way to store, sort, and filter time-tracking data.
- Cost-Effective: Most businesses have access to tools like Excel or Google Sheets.
- Reporting: Data can be analyzed and turned into charts or reports for better insights.
Cons
- Manual Input: Entering data by hand can be tedious and error-prone.
- Collaboration Challenges: Multiple users working on the same spreadsheet can lead to version conflicts.
- Steeper Learning Curve: Some spreadsheet functions require advanced knowledge for practical use.
- Limited Automation: Without external tools, spreadsheets lack built-in time-tracking automation.
3. Biometric Clock-In: A High-Tech Way to Track Time
Biometric clock-in systems verify employee identities using unique physiological characteristics, such as fingerprints, facial recognition, or iris scans. This technology offers a highly secure and accurate method of clocking in, mitigating bad timekeeping practices like buddy punching.
Pros of Biometric Clock-In
- Enhanced Security: Biometric systems greatly reduce the risk of unauthorized access by requiring employees to authenticate their identities using unique biological traits.
- Timesheet Accuracy: Unlike traditional methods like time cards or PIN codes, biometric time tracking eliminates the possibility of manual errors. Since there is only one way employees clock in, there is only one point of failure in the timekeeping process.
Cons of Biometric Clock-In
- Cost: Implementing biometric clock-in systems can be costly because it requires specialized hardware and software. Maintenance and support expenses will also add up over time.
- Security Risks: Requiring employee biometrics is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it prevents a level of protection against unauthorized access and fraudulent timekeeping that’s hard to match. On the other, outsiders can access highly confidential and personal employee information in the event of a security breach.
- Technical Limitations: Biometric systems may sometimes fail to recognize fingerprints or facial features accurately, leading to disruptions in time tracking and employee frustration. These systems are often designed to clock in and out, so they don’t have advanced reporting or analytics capabilities.
4. GPS Clock-In: An Accurate Method for Tracking Remote Employees
GPS clock-in systems use Global Positioning System (GPS) technology to track employee work hours based on location. Data from employees’ mobile devices or dedicated tracking hardware allows businesses to monitor employee attendance accurately and verify their presence at designated work locations.
Pros of GPS Clock-In
- Geographical Accuracy: GPS clock-in systems provide precise location tracking, allowing businesses to verify employee attendance at specific job sites. This also makes reporting work updates to clients easier.
- Field Team Monitoring: GPS clock-in systems offer a reliable method of tracking work hours for field workers. Geofencing ensures accurate attendance tracking and work hours recording as one’s timer only works when inside of the job site.
- Efficient Resource Allocation: Location data allows managers to optimize route planning for field teams and plan job assignments based on employee locations. This can lead to improved operational efficiency and cost savings.
Cons of GPS Clock-In
- Privacy Concerns: Employees may have privacy concerns about being continuously monitored through GPS tracking and getting every employee’s consent before implementing a location tracking policy in your company.
- Battery Constraints: Continuous GPS tracking on mobile devices can quickly drain battery life, particularly for field-based employees.
- No Productivity Tracking: While GPS tracking is reliable for verifying whether an employee is at a job site, it doesn’t show how productive they are while they’re there. This makes them a poor choice for jobs that rely on software tools.
5. Mobile Apps: The Flexible Way to Track Employee Hours
Mobile apps offer a convenient and accessible way to track employee hours. With the prevalence of smartphones and tablets, employees can quickly be onboarded to these tracking apps.
This flexibility empowers employees to seamlessly transition between tasks and locations while maintaining accountability and transparency. Because mobile apps don’t require you to work at a desk most of the day, they’re ideal for teams working in the field.
Pros of Mobile Apps
- Accessibility: Employees can track their work hours on the go, whether at the office, remotely, or traveling.
- Real-Time Updates: Unlike desktop-based time tracking tools, employees don’t have to look for a WiFi network or a place to set up their laptops to provide updates.
- Location Tracking Features: Mobile apps with GPS tracking capabilities allow you to verify employee locations during work hours, ensuring they’re at the right job sites at the right time. Some apps offer geofencing features that allow for automated, location-based clock-ins and clock-outs.
Cons of Mobile Apps
- Internet Instability: Teams on the go will likely spend most of their time without a stable WiFi connection, instead relying on cellular networks to keep the tracking app functioning. This may pose challenges in areas with limited connectivity.
- Battery Drain: Continuous use of apps can drain your employee devices’ battery quickly (especially if GPS tracking features are enabled). These battery issues can then impact productivity.
6. Paper Timesheets: The Original Way to Track Employee Hours
Paper timesheets provide an uncomplicated solution for recording your business activities. You can note what you finish in every 20 or 35-minute segment to ensure that your objectives, tasks, and goals are accurately documented.
It does not need any internet connection, so it is suitable for use anywhere. Managing multiple projects with timesheets can be difficult and lead to inaccuracies since essential details can be overlooked. Also, keeping precise records with timesheets to track employees’ time can prove challenging.
Pros
- Simplicity: Paper timesheets are easy to set up and don’t require any specialized tools or technology.
- No Internet Needed: They’re perfect for offline use, making them ideal for environments without reliable Internet access.
- Low Cost: Minimal setup or maintenance costs compared to digital solutions.
Cons
- Prone to Errors: Handwritten entries can lead to inaccuracies or omissions.
- Time-Consuming: Collecting, organizing, and analyzing data manually takes significant effort.
- Storage Issues: Physical timesheets can accumulate over time and require proper storage.
- Limited Scalability: Managing paper timesheets becomes cumbersome as teams or projects grow.
7. Timers: A Simple Way To Track Employee Hours
Timers are a simple and efficient method for tracking the time spent on a project. You can start the timer while beginning each task and observe precisely how much time is spent and what progress has been made. This also gives a better understanding of the timeline needed to complete the task.
Pros
- Real-Time Accuracy: Timers provide precise measurements of time spent on specific tasks.
- Insights into Work Patterns: They help employees and managers understand how time is allocated and identify inefficiencies.
- Ease of Use: Most timers are straightforward to implement with minimal training.
Cons
- Interruptions Impact Accuracy: Forgetting to start or stop a timer can skew data.
- Focus on Microtasks: Employees might feel pressured to record every activity, reducing focus on larger goals.
- Limited for Team Tracking: Individual timers don’t work well for monitoring group efforts or collaboration.
8. Keep A Log: An Effective Method for Tracking Employee Hours
Keeping a log of your daily activities is a powerful tool for tracking the progress of your projects. It will also allow you to quickly review the time invested into each task, ensuring accurate data and records.
Pros
- Detailed Tracking: Logs comprehensively view daily activities and time spent on tasks.
- Promotes Accountability: Employees are more conscious of their time when documenting activities.
- Flexible Format: Logs can be tailored to suit individual or team needs.
Cons
- Time-Intensive. Manually recording activities throughout the day can interrupt workflow.
- Potential for Inaccuracies. Logs rely on memory if entries are made retrospectively.
- Harder to Scale. Reviewing and analyzing logs for larger teams can be overwhelming.
Related Reading
- How To Track Hours Worked
- Calendar Audit
- Time Audit For Employees
- Time Audit Examples
- Keeping Track Of Time At Work
- How to Track Time Spent on Tasks
Why Track Time Employees Spend on Tasks
Tracking time spent on tasks is essential for improving productivity. The more time-efficient employees are, the more productive your teams will be. But how do you know if they’re working as productively as possible? Yep, you guessed it, with time-tracking data.
Time trackers are managers’ secret weapon in the battle against wasted time. The more you know about how your employees spend their work hours, the easier it is to identify and eliminate activities that hurt productivity. And that’s no small feat.
Boosting Workplace Efficiency: How Time Tracking Minimizes Distractions and Optimizes Productivity
One comprehensive study found the average employee is productive for less than 3 hours in a typical eight-hour workday. The rest of the time goes to:
- Calls
- Meetings
- Messaging
- Checking social media
- Making coffee
- Chatting with colleagues
While many of these are legitimate workplace activities and, in some instances, essential for camaraderie, they don’t warrant 25 hours a week. And the bigger the company, the more costly the implications. Large organizations waste approximately $100 million a year on unnecessary meetings alone.
Tracking employees’ time helps you minimize distractions, create more space for focus time, fine-tune policies, and, most importantly, optimize your time costs to support employee well-being.
Tackle: Revolutionize Time Tracking with AI and Calendar Integration
Tackle revolutionizes time tracking through seamless calendar integration, eliminating the need for manual logging. Our platform automatically captures and categorizes your time, providing actionable insights through intuitive dashboards and reports.
We’ve built everything you need into one seamless package:
- An intelligent tagging system that works your way
- AI-powered automation to handle the tedious stuff
- Flexible reporting tools to track what matters
- Intelligent time capture right in your browser
Trusted by Roblox, Deel, and Lightspeed Ventures teams, Tackle helps executives, team leaders, and customer-facing professionals understand and optimize their time allocation. Simply connect your Google or Outlook calendar, set up custom tags and automations, and gain valuable insights into how your team spends their time.
Whether you’re tracking strategic initiatives, measuring team efficiency, or ensuring resource optimization, Tackle transforms time monitoring from a chore into a powerful decision-making tool.
Start using our automatic time-tracking software for free with one click today!
7 Best Time Tracking Software to Track Hours Worked
1. Tackle: The Revolution in Time Tracking
Tackle revolutionizes time tracking through seamless calendar integration, eliminating the need for manual logging. Our platform automatically captures and categorizes your time, providing actionable insights through intuitive dashboards and reports.
We’ve built everything you need into one seamless package:
- An intelligent tagging system that works your way
- AI-powered automation to handle the tedious stuff
- Flexible reporting tools to track what matters
- Intelligent time capture right in your browser
Trusted by Roblox, Deel, and Lightspeed Ventures teams, Tackle helps executives, team leaders, and customer-facing professionals understand and optimize their time allocation. Simply connect your Google or Outlook calendar, set up custom tags and automations, and gain valuable insights into how your team spends their time.
Whether you’re tracking strategic initiatives, measuring team efficiency, or ensuring resource optimization, Tackle transforms time monitoring from a chore into a powerful decision-making tool.
Start using our automatic time-tracking software for free with one click today!
2. Time Doctor: The Employee Monitoring Tool of Choice
Time Doctor is a time and productivity tracking app designed for companies whose employees primarily work on computers. In addition to letting you capture the hours employees work, you can see what employees do with their time while billing hours. Time Doctor has features like app and URL monitoring that let you know what websites employees spend their time on, automatic screenshots to see what they were doing on those sites, and idle detection to see when they’re logged in but not working.
It can do this monitoring silently, meaning employees won’t know you’re monitoring their activities. This makes it a great choice if you believe time theft is a problem among your knowledge workers.
3. QuickBooks Time: Best for Accounting Integration
QuickBooks Time has features like GPS tracking, mileage tracking, and geofencing that are great for businesses with traveling employees. With it, you can track time and mileage in one place, making it easy to calculate and include mileage reimbursements in payroll. QuickBooks
Time also supports automatic time tracking based on work schedules or geofencing, where clocking in and out can be triggered by location-based boundaries. Its smartphone apps can record time entries even when employees are offline, syncing the data once reconnected. While most of the other tools on this list offer integrations with QuickBooks Online, Desktop, and Payroll, because QuickBooks Time is also an Intuit product, these tools all work together seamlessly, requiring no integration.
4. Harvest: Best for Freelancers
Harvest has a free plan that’s great for self-employed freelancers. With it, you can track your time toward up to two projects, create invoices, and accept payments through PayPal and Stripe. If you use QuickBooks Online or Xero for accounting, Harvest will copy any payments you receive on those platforms. Because Harvest tracks your time by task/project, creating detailed invoices is easy. It copies all of your tasks and time attached to them, calculates the total hours, determines the amount owed, and details all of this information line-by-line on your client invoices automatically.
Regarding tracking your time, Harvest is flexible and has handy features that ensure no billable time goes unbilled. You can connect it to your calendar to capture the time you spend in meetings with clients, and you can download its apps for:
- Mac
- Windows
- iPhone
- Android
5. Clockify: Best Free Option
If you need to switch from manual to automatic time tracking but don’t have the budget to spend on a subscription app, Clockify might be the right choice for your business. It has a generous free plan with essential time tracking for unlimited team members. And while free always sounds better than paid, Clockify’s free plan features are minimal and suitable only for basic time tracking. Team members can clock in and out, their time is collected into timesheets, and you can download timesheet reports at the end of the month for running payroll.
You can’t customize report downloads on the free plan; its payroll integrations are only available on its paid plans. Other helpful features you’ll find in the free plan include the ability to download Clockify onto a tablet to use it as a time clock kiosk, unlimited projects to track time spent on specific projects and tasks, and integrations with Outlook, Google Calendar, and several project management platforms.
6. Toggl Track: Best for Small Teams
Like Clockify, Toggl Track also has a free plan. It’s more restrictive than Clockify’s in terms of user count you can only have up to five users on Toggl Track’s free plan, but you get many more features in Toggle Track for those five users than you get in Clockify for unlimited users.
You also get access to much more advanced features. Toggl Track will automatically track time for your employees, sorting time into the proper client projects and tasks based on the following:
- Keywords
- Applications
- URLs
If team members forget to log time, they can view a timeline to see what they were working on and when. Team members can also track time for multiple employees at once, such as if you have numerous people in a meeting, by adding teammates to their time entries. Toggle Track is an anti-surveillance tool, which means the data it collects is designed to help employees track their time instead of for management to review.
7. ClickTime: Best for Professional Services
ClickTime is a project time tracking and resource planning platform for professional services businesses and agencies. In addition to tracking employee time overall and against specific clients’ tasks and projects, you can also improve your forecasting and make sure projects stay on budget. With ClickTime, employees can log their time to billable or non-billable tasks.
Admins and managers can then review those reports to optimize productivity by reducing or eliminating the types of work you can’t bill clients for, such as unnecessary internal meetings. ClickTime also takes all of your historical data and pairs it with your plans to help you understand how many employee hours new projects will take to complete, how the hours you’ve worked compared to the hours you estimated I’d need, and how much work each member of your team is assigned.
Related Reading
- Time Insights Google Calendar
- Best Employee Time Tracking App
- Time Card App For Employees
- AI Time Tracking App
- Time Audit App
- ProofHub Alternatives
3 Best Practices For Tracking Hours Worked
1. Practice Transparency and Clear Communication About Time Tracking
Nobody likes feeling like they’re being micromanaged. Employees might push back against time tracking if they think it’s just a way to monitor them. The key is to be upfront about why tracking time matters. It’s not just about keeping tabsit but also about ensuring fair pay, preventing burnout, and ensuring work is evenly distributed.
When employees see time tracking as a tool that benefits them, they’re far more likely to engage with it. Regular check-ins, team meetings, and open discussions about expectations can help build trust and ensure that time tracking is seen as a positive, not a burden.
2. Audit Regularly to Catch Mistakes Early
Even the best systems aren’t foolproof. Whether it’s an employee forgetting to clock in, a system glitch, or an accidental misreporting of hours, errors happen. That’s why regular audits are crucial. Checking time records periodically helps catch discrepancies before they become major issues like payroll errors, compliance problems, or disputes over hours worked.
Audits can reveal important patterns, such as one department consistently working overtime, which could signal inefficiencies that need addressing. Staying on top of this keeps things fair and helps avoid more significant headaches.
3. Use Data to Improve Productivity
Modern time-tracking tools do more than count hours. They offer valuable insights into work habits and efficiency. Businesses can optimize schedules, distribute workloads more effectively, and even boost productivity by analyzing trends.
If data shows that employees are most productive in the morning, managers can schedule deep-focus tasks during that window. Frequent idle time could indicate bottlenecks in processes that need fixing. Time tracking isn’t just about monitoring. It’s about using accurate data to create a smoother, more efficient workflow for everyone.
Related Reading
- TimeCamp Alternatives
- ProofHub Alternatives
- Sling Alternatives
- Jibble Alternatives
- TSheets Alternatives
- Time Audit App
- Timeular Alternatives
- ActivTrak Alternatives
Start Using Our Automatic Time Tracking Software for Free with One-click Today
Tackle revolutionizes time tracking through seamless calendar integration, eliminating the need for manual logging. Our platform automatically captures and categorizes your time, providing actionable insights through intuitive dashboards and reports.
We’ve built everything you need into one seamless package:
- An intelligent tagging system that works your way
- AI-powered automation to handle the tedious stuff
- Flexible reporting tools to track what matters
- Intelligent time capture right in your browser
Trusted by Roblox, Deel, and Lightspeed Ventures teams, Tackle helps executives, team leaders, and customer-facing professionals understand and optimize their time allocation. Simply connect your Google or Outlook calendar, set up custom tags and automations, and gain valuable insights into how your team spends their time.
Whether you’re tracking strategic initiatives, measuring team efficiency, or ensuring resource optimization, Tackle transforms time monitoring from a chore into a powerful decision-making tool.
Start using our automatic time-tracking software for free with one click today!
