Common Metrics to Consider When Tracking Time on Projects

When implementing time tracker PC solutions, the first piece of advice you should keep in mind is to track with reason. What this means is that even though scheduling and time tracking software can have a lot of appealing features, you should never track everything for the sake of tracking. For every metric you decide to take into account, you need to ask yourself ‘Why do I need to know this?’

Things are no different when you use a time tracker for projects. Soon upon installing one, you’ll discover that you can measure and track many things, including time on tasks, apps used, attendance, overtime, screenshots, real time data, daily reports, and so on.

If you track all of this indiscriminately, you’ll end up wasting a lot of time and resources on collecting the data you won’t know how to use.

Luckily, we’ve compiled a shortlist of four features of a time tracker for projects that are essential for any business and any project that’s being overseen, along with the reasons why you should be considering these metrics and how to use them to the benefit of the project and your business at large.

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1. Who Does What

Even a simple time tracker will give you insight into who’s working on which part of the project. The top time tracking tools will give you this information in real time as well as in the form of a report or overview. This is a basic but powerful feature because you can find out which employee in a team does design in Photoshop, which one makes PowerPoint presentations and who does outreach via email. This can come in especially handy if you have thousands of employees and can’t get to know their team dynamics otherwise.

Now on to the real question - how can you use this data from your time tracker for projects?

Well, first of all, it resolves the issue of accountability. If a problem happens on a project, you’ll be able to know who exactly to turn to in order to explain what happened and try to fix the issue.

And secondly, this hour tracking software data can help inform your future decisions on work delegation. Since you know which employee is efficient and used to working in certain apps or on particular types of tasks, you’ll be able to assign future tasks and projects accordingly to get optimal efficiency.

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2. Time for Specific Tasks

Another core functionality of computer usage time tracking software is, well, time tracking. It can show you exactly how long each employee worked on a specific task within a project.

This could be useful information for many reasons. The obvious one is tracking progress. Time tracker for projects will tell you how many tasks are done and how many are in progress, which will give you a pretty accurate estimate of how close the team is to completing the project.

You can control much of the workflow by setting milestones and measuring how much time it takes your team to reach them. This can also help you decide how to set reasonable and appropriate deadlines for similar projects in the future.

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3. Billable Hours

Some types of employee scheduling and time tracking software, such as Insightful, let you combine the time tracking functionality that we mentioned in the previous section with the hourly rate that you can manually set for each employee or project individually. This creates a precise and accurate account of billable hours.

This report provided by an hours worked tracker app is an excellent way to present your progress and project costs to your client. It’s automatic, accurate, neat and customizable.

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4. Software Used

Another one of the pillar features of time tracking business software is detecting which programs your employees use and how much time they spend it them, as well as which websites they visit.

Having these insights can tell you which resources are necessary for each type of project, even if you’re not familiar with the procedures. You can use this to decide which software and website subscriptions you should keep investing in and what resources to drop and save some money. This has the potential to make future projects easier to track and more practical in terms of the cost.

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Bonus Tip for Tracking Projects

As a bonus, we’ll let you in on a little secret - you can use something called automatic time mapping to make project tracking much easier.

Not every employee hours tracker has this feature, but Insightful is one of those that do. Automated time tracking works by detecting the name of the file that an employee is working on and assigns that time to a specific project. The system is immune to errors and completely hands-free, which is the reason why it’s perfect for tracking projects.

It’ll make the measuring of all the other metrics we’ve discussed much easier, so it might be worth considering.

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Conclusion

Tracking projects accurately and with business goals in mind is simply a responsible thing to do. But if you really want to take your company efficiency to the next level and optimize your business processes, using a time tracker for projects is the best way to do just that. And hopefully, now you know how by understanding what to track and why.

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