6 Problems Mobile Timesheets Can Solve for You in a Remote Work Landscape
You can’t see them. You can’t hear them. You don’t even know if they’re really there or not. With a vast number of businesses hastily adopting the remote work model as a result of sweeping lockdowns across the globe, it has become more complicated than ever to keep track of your employees and to ensure that they have the support they need to offer their best work.
In many cases, this has meant a rapid decline in productivity resulting in losses for both companies and their employees as both attempt to settle into a new normal. For organizations that have experience with employees working either from home or remote locations, this can be an ongoing challenge that doesn’t seem to have a clear solution. But simply hoping for the best isn’t a viable business practice, and teams need better ways to account for their time in an effort to drive results on a company-wide scale. This is where mobile timesheets come into play.
Mobile timesheets offer a streamlined solution for keeping track of employee time and attendance. Designed to increase productivity and enable accuracy in payroll and accounting processes, Replicon’s mobile timesheet app provides organizations with the ability to better manage remote teams, easily keep track of the time employees spend on different projects or tasks, and help businesses account for hours spent. Today, technology is keeping teams together to focus on common goals, and mobile timesheets act as a valuable tool for solving six major problems to ensure that everyone remains on the same page along the way.
1. Inaccurate Time Tracking/Timesheet Data
Humans are capable of performing a vast array of tasks with accuracy and efficiency, but keeping track of time spent on individual tasks isn’t exactly our strong suit. The issue with traditional timesheets is that employees will often have to rely on memory to recount how much time has been allocated to their work. This results in accounting and payroll inconsistencies and can ultimately hurt your bottom line.
Mobile timesheets enable all employees to provide accurate information on the fly, whether they’re in the field or working from home. The best time to recall specific metrics is right after they occur, and recording this information in real time helps to reduce errors as a result. These updates are instantly accessible by team managers who can then validate completed tasks quickly, catch any errors or inaccuracies before they generate larger issues, and organize their staff according to top priorities.
2. Delayed Approvals & Processes
The manual review and validation of employee timesheets, invoices, expenses, and time-off requests can be tedious and creates a bottleneck effect that negatively impacts the productivity of your managers and team leaders. Constant checks and requests for supporting documents can slow down the approval process, inhibit the ability to proceed with successive work, and cost your organization valuable time. But if employees could submit their timesheets electronically, request time off based on the type of time off, browse through holiday calendars to see available dates, and submit digital expense receipts, it would remove a lot of the weight that comes with these validations and approvals.
Mobile timesheets offer a streamlined approval process with built-in notifications and alerts enabling managers to validate and sign off on important documents on time and on the go. The fast approval and validation ability gained as a result of mobile timesheets enables teams to keep tighter schedules for projects and tasks, ensures that progress isn’t halted or held up unnecessarily, and creates a simple flow of information to crucial departments including HR, payroll, and accounting.
3. Lack of Visibility
Simply put, not all employees work well at home. Remote work can be a challenge for some as it breaks the normal routine of the traditional workday. Organizations must ensure that employees are being paid to produce results, and it’s difficult for managers to ensure work is being taken seriously without the ability to visibly check on their employees. This can damage workflows and reputations, and place client work in jeopardy.
Mobile timesheets with built-in GPS functionality enable managers to keep a closer eye on employee productivity, see where employees are working from, and ensure that daily work is being completed. Furthermore, geofencing capabilities can be utilized to track when employees enter or exit a predefined job site. This instant information can provide better insight into the activities of each day as opposed to specific milestones when a lack of productivity may have already created a larger problem.
4. Inability to Forecast
Accounting for time spent on individual projects is essential for estimating and budgeting future initiatives. This can be difficult without a dedicated reporting system that keeps an accurate record of where employee time has been spent. To remain competitive, organizations must be able to accurately predict the amount of resources it will take to deliver a finished result to a client, and mobile timesheets offer built-in tools to track these crucial metrics instantly in real time.
By recording time spent on specific work within an automated timesheet calculator, accounting departments can extract detailed information with regards to the number of employees required to complete the project as well as the anticipated project duration. This means maximum visibility into time and cost, and increased accuracy in terms of billing, employee pay, and overall forecasting.
5. Unproductive Employees
Goals are a big part of business, and it’s essential for teams to work collaboratively to achieve them. Without a firm handle on where time is being spent, managers can begin to lose touch with employees who become unproductive due to a lack of support and direction. With the ability to set productivity targets and real-time input capability of a mobile timesheet app, you can gain instant visibility into the productivity of employees. This helps teams to set targets and remain accountable while managers can oversee progress based on instant insights. In turn, they can then offer their employees the guidance necessary to achieve positive results. Even while working remotely, teams need to have the ability to rally together to hit and surpass targets. Not only does this improve corporate morale, but it creates success for both the company and its employees.
6. Unplanned Overtime
Overtime creates additional costs for your organization, which can be detrimental to the financial success of a project. These unforeseen or unplanned costs directly impact your bottom line, and it’s difficult to determine when they will occur without a proper strategy in place. By implementing mobile timesheets, you can collect time data effortlessly and track overtime trends across projects and teams. This will provide your organization with the ability to not only predict potential patterns but develop further strategies to avoid overtime altogether. In short, the data that mobile timesheets collect can provide valuable information and help you to ensure that each project has been allocated the correct equipment, resources, and staffing to remain financially on track.
Replicon’s Mobile Timesheet Solution
Ultimately, the use of mobile timesheets within a dedicated mobile timesheet app can help your enterprise by offering control, stability, and predictability during the transition into remote work, or help you to regain control of time spent by your existing remote workforce. Flexible timesheet templates can enable your teams to report their time more effectively and provide valuable insights that help you forecast and make educated decisions. Replicon’s mobile timesheet app offers the ability to track time from anywhere and on any device, with fast access to each employee’s data. With streamlined systems for expenses, time-off requests, and daily timesheets, cutting down on lost time is simple, and something that your enterprise can experience today.
Explore our time tracking product suite to see how Replicon’s mobile timesheet app can save time within your organization and help you tighten up your bottom line.
