Leverage Replicon’s Smart Approvals to Get Time Tracking Done Faster
A common New Year’s resolution for most people includes, in some form, wanting to manage time better, being more productive at work, and focusing on what matters in life. If you are a manager, these resolutions are definitely on your list, no matter the time of year.
As a manager, you’ve likely got more to do than you can reasonably handle. A top culprit can be the time spent on manual timesheet approvals. Studies indicate that approximately 25 percent of a manager’s time is spent on manually approving timesheets, expense sheets, and time-off requests. The cost of this is pretty high if you consider the time lost on other high-priority tasks.
If 30 people report to you, manually approving timesheets could take approximately 7-8 minutes per person. This amounts to four hours a week, which could otherwise be spent on work-related tasks that require manual intervention.
In addition to losing this valuable time, manually approving timesheets can also lead to:
- Human error, which is often unavoidable
- A large amount of data processing/data entry work, which is usually undesirable by managers
- A loss of work hours — manual timesheet management and errors cost U.S. employers over 50 million work hours a day in lost productivity
The Road to a New Age Automated Time Tracking System
Replicon’s automated time tracking suite enables businesses to gather their employee’s time information on one easily accessible cloud-based platform to give a single source of truth. You’ll have the ability to track all the project time with 100 percent accuracy, gain complete visibility into how your resources are being allocated, and review costs associated with time spent. Reporting, rates, approvals, global labor law compliance — everything your business needs — can be tracked with Replicon’s one-stop solution.
Learn How We Enabled Better Investment Decisions By Simply Tracking Time
Our automated time tracker captures all of the available time for all your resources for accurate timesheet management, payroll processing, client billing, and compliance. For an organization of 500 employees, this translates into 1,040,000 hours. It helps speed up the process of approvals for all those hours by a significant amount, which results in freeing up your time for other tasks. Called “Smart Approvals,” this feature makes it easy to quickly and efficiently approve timesheets.
Billable time is revenue, so capturing all resource hours is of primary importance. It also helps manage the delivery of those services and billable hours and enables you to understand your costs, billing, and profits in real time. The system also optimizes the resources you have, ensuring people are deployed efficiently and generate as much revenue as possible. Approving timesheets in real time also speeds up the billing cycle.
How Do Smart Approvals Work?
Intelligent Validations and Automatic Routing
You can automate timesheet approvals by setting pre-defined rules. This will eliminate the manual interruption and help you to process timesheets quickly and reduce timesheet errors.
Scenario: You require your team members to clock in eight hours a day and complete a total of 40 hours a week (default validation rule). If this happens, the system automatically approves the timesheets. If not, a validation error will be raised and brought to your attention.
Multi-Level Approvals
Direct supervisor approval is a need of many organizations. With Replicon’s comprehensive time tracking suite, organizations can customize approval workflows as needed to handle escalations that support business policies based on real-time data and to add other people to the approval path. You can include supervisors, finance managers, and other stakeholders.
Scenario: You are managing a large project, and multiple billings are submitted to you for approval. Any billing that is below a set amount, say $10,000, can be approved by one of your team leads, and if it’s above $10,000, it can be approved by you. This way, you can filter approvals that need your attention based on parameters (cost, priority, time, designation, etc.) and delegate the rest to others in the chain of approval.
Dynamic Routing
Dynamic routing lets you validate data in real time for exceptions or events and route timesheets for approvals as per specific requirements. This reduces unnecessary delays in the approval process and streamlines the entire workflow. Timesheets won’t be left sitting in anyone’s queue.
Scenario: If you are unavailable, timesheets can be routed to the next available manager for quick approval.
Notifications
Smart Approvals let you trigger messages based on time or events:
- Event-based notifications: Sent when an event occurs.
- Time-based notifications: Sent at a specified time.
Scenario: A notification can be sent to you when your team members submit a timesheet for approval, or instant notifications can be sent to remind users to submit their timesheets on time.
With work from home becoming the new normal, mobile capabilities are a must now. You will be able to quickly access data using the mobile app. You can also send notifications by email or as push notifications to those using Replicon’s mobile app.
If you want to ensure accurate time tracking, streamline costing, billing, and pay while getting rid of the manual approval process, go for an all-encompassing solution like Replicon’s automated time tracking system. Ensure your workforce and managers are focused on the work at hand and reduce administrative overheads and wasteful costs. Customers see up to a 90 percent decrease in the overall processing times and are able to make real-time decisions with confidence.
Learn How We Enabled Better Investment Decisions By Simply Tracking Time
