So far in parts one and two, we’ve covered how time tracking apps can save you administrative time (and paper), increase communication between the field and office, miss less billable events and even make your crews more productive. In this final part three of How Time Tracking Apps Can Help Your Business, we’re going to discuss how time tracking apps can also improve your job costing and make your estimates more accurate.
Certain time tracking apps will allow you to track your time to a specific task within a job, rather than the job as a whole. By being able to track your actual time spent versus estimated on individual tasks you’ll be able to drill down into your estimates to see where exactly you’re going over or under on hours for every job you work on. Not only this, but because you’re using a time app to track time and not pen and paper, it’s being recorded digitally which can arguably provide more accurate information as there’s less chance for mistakes to occur from transferring timesheets on paper to your payroll service or by misreading what was written on the time sheet.
You can then use this information to help fine tune your future estimates for similar jobs resulting in more accurate estimates. When you’re only tracking hours on the job you miss out on a lot of detail and the ability to set accurate key performance indicators(KPIs) for task specific projects. For example, you may have a job that involves both installation work and service work and need to keep those hours separate for incentive bonus programs. By using a time tracking app such as LMN Time you can separate out these tasks of a job to make KPI tracking that much easier, not to mention it’s done right from your phone or tablet!
Time tracking apps help you accurately check your profit centers.
These tasks that your time can be tracked to can all be linked to Service Items or Cost Codes that will also connect to your QuickBooks company file. By doing this, you’ll be able to pull data on services such as Maintenance or Fall Clean Ups to see how your company is doing with those profit centers. This results in more easily accessible information for your management team to see exactly which divisions or profit centers are making you money, and which are underperforming. Because this information is being recorded live from the app in real time, there’s no need to wait for time sheets to get manually entered in either, resulting in faster access to that information.
In conclusion, there’s some great apps out there available to use for tracking your time digitally that will make your lives a lot easier and even keep some more money in your pocket! Personally, here at LMN we’re biased and recommend you use LMN Time (surprise!), but if you don’t want to take our word for it or our 30,000+ users, check out our free trial and try it yourself today!
