What does return on investment mean?
ROI time tracking is just one of many things worth calculating. But not the only one. So, what is ROI itself?
Return on investment is one of the most important measures you need to analyze in your business. Even when you’re a freelancer or an employee, that’s something you should have in your mind, while making your decisions.
ROI answers the most important question: should you invest in this idea or not? If the estimated ROI looks poorly, just don’t. It would be a waste of all the recourses you have.
To count your return on investment, you just need few data. ROI=benefits-costs. However, what you should also consider is a payback period.
The payback period is your cost of the investment divided by the annual cash flow (cash received are inflows, while money spent represents outflows). Of course, the shorter the payback period, the better investment.
Besides typical long types of investments, more than 12 months is not the period of payback you want. Especially in times of inflation (when the value of your currency may drop really fast).
You can’t forget about time.
Prove me wrong if you don’t agree.
Because time and money are best friends. You need time to make money, but you want to make money in the shortest possible time you can. It is so crucial that, actually, most of the companies pay their employees per hour. They literally pay for other people’s time. This is limited for every human being btw.
That is something we can’t regain. We’re losing it since we’re born and no one actually knows, how much time do they have left. As long as we’re not immortals, right next to health, it is our most precious resource.
That is why your employee time is yours of business recourse. That is why you ask every teammate to fill their timesheet. But have you actually consider how much time does it take… to fill it properly? Or even worse, fill it properly on the paper type of timesheet?
How much extra time does it cost your business to collect all the data and analyze them? And how do you suppose to know if every employee fills the timesheet correctly and honestly? What about all these minutes, that change to hours, spent on coffee, chat, Facebook and cat-memes? Do you know how often do employees make breaks in reality?
You don’t.
But you can. If you implement the right time tracking system. And yes, you guess it right. The right system could be TimeCamp. Which has also a free version, just if you wonder right now how much money will it cost you.
It will not just track on how do your employees spend their time, so you can help them to improve. Thanks to this kind of software, you will be able to see how much time does it cost you to finish your projects. This will help you estimate better, prioritize and also set up the prices accurately.
Benefits of implementing time and attendance software
Before we move on to calculating ROI, let’s take a look at all the possible benefits you can get while using TimeCamp or other time tracking software.
As you already know from the previous paragraphs, the right solution gives you a lot of information, extremely helpful in workforce management.
What may seem like a simple automated timesheet is actually more than this. TimeCamp gives you access to complex reports that are answers to many questions. Also, for these, you even didn’t think about.
All the data entry happens automatically, accepting the ready timesheet is fast and easy, and because the software measures everything in real-time, you will mostly avoid human error.
You save not just every employee time, but also your own, as you don’t need to read every timesheet separately and find what’s there to improve. TimeCamp will just show you anything you want to see.
👉 Read more about Best Timesheets Apps!
What is that troubles your employees the most? What does take them the most hours? Who deals with the tasks the fastest?
Let’s better focus on how much money it can earn for you. Even – or especially – on its more complex Pro version.
Why and how to measure ROI time tracking?
Return on investment is back in our game. So, why would you measure it for a time tracking system? Why is even time tracking something important to your business?
Because you really want to know where your money goes. You want to know, how much do your employees spend on each activity. Especially on these non-project-related. You want to estimate your project’s budgets correctly, and you want to save time: which is money.
And this is why time tracking is so important. And this is why you want to check how big ROI you can get thanks to it.
But how to measure return on investment in time tracking properly? Well, the easiest way to do this is to use our ROI calculator.
It is simple to use, but it gives you the answer you need. It’s useful not just when you want to decide if a time and attendance system will be a good investment for you. Some of those systems, for example, TimeCamp, will give you very useful data about your employees.
Thanks to these data, you will be able to see your exact billable rate, and you will be able to increase it.
This is the solution that your business needs if you want to reduce costs per project, boost the productivity of your employees and really save some money.
Which time and attendance system to choose?
This time I will not give you any list of possible solutions to choose from. Instead, you will get a list of things you should consider before deciding on one.
ROI of the time tracking system will make you happy for sure, but there are many things that can even boost your savings.
While looking for the software for your business, pay attention to:
- An effort that your employees need to make for data entry. As I’ve told you before, TimeCamp can do this automatically if you download a desktop app, but not all software work like this. If your employees need to fill every timesheet like they used to do on paper, then you save just paper costs, but not their time.
- Customization options. As your company is special, you need software that suits you and helps to eliminate problems, not cause them. That is why your chosen solution should let you make your own tasks categories, so you can track the exact time spend on each of them.
- Monthly, weekly, and daily report’s quality. If your software gives you weird and useless reports, you will spend your precious time on calculations. On the other hand, a nice and complex report will help you and other managers to spot productivity issues and eliminate them.
- Integrations. Because time and attendance software is not the only one you need in your organization. Good workforce management needs a few more tools, and you want them all to work like one machine.
- Billing features. Very useful for a small company instead of normal invoicing systems, or just to show your customer how much time do you really spend on his project. Thanks to this feature, you will make your process even easier, and you will be able to avoid many communication errors when it comes to billing your customer.
- Support. Even the greatest technology needs some additional support from real human beings. Choose the time and attendance software that gives you that. Knowing that you can always ask for help or for a special feature is crucial. A great team will help you to use their product and will hear you out, while developing it. There’s something new in the technology world every week, so the product which is not been constantly improving, won’t be useful for you.
These 6 factors are crucial when it comes to choosing the best time and attending system for your organization.
If it’s easy to use, your employees will save even more time. If you can customize it, you will get even more savings.
Quality reports are not just cutting the time spent on analyzes, but thanks to them, you can find the most time-consuming tasks and work with your employees to change it.
Accurate integrations work like another automation, helping you to manage every process faster.
Billing solutions make communication with your customers easier, and they eliminate trust issues problems.
Great service guarantees flawless workflow and boosts your productivity even more.
Everything makes you save dozens of minutes per day, which means that you save dozens of dollars as well. Just imagine how big savings it will be yearly!
This is the ROI that everyone in your organization will like.
Conclusion
Now you know why it’s worth checking the ROI time tracking system and how huge the benefits of the time and attendance system actually are.
If you’re not sure yet which software should you use, check out related posts under this article.
Or to save more of your and every employee time (you know what I mean :)) you can go straight to our registration site and implement the system immediately.
Just in case you want to see some great numbers, take a look at our calculator.