MinuteDock

Why You Should Be Tracking All of Your Time

Whether You Plan to Bill for it or Not!

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Bryce Armstrong, Customer Success Manager, MinuteDock

Bryce is dipping his toes into the cloud-based accounting ecosystem after recently partnering up with his brother Jared, founder of MinuteDock: time management software for professional services.

The team from MinuteDock put forward an argument for tracking billable and non-billable time to get the most out of your time tracking service...

It’s a common

misconception when people start using time tracking software: the idea that we should only bother tracking the hours we mean to actually charge the client for. But it’s important to consider whether keeping track of your non-billable hours might be worthwhile. In fact, you might well discover that tracking all of your work hours during a given day is highly worthwhile. Understanding how much of your workday is getting used for certain non-billable tasks, such as staff meetings, will let you identify areas where you might be using an inefficient process.

It’s hugely valuable to gain an in-depth understanding of which parts of your workday are actually generating income for your business. Knowing how you are spending billable and non-billable time is the first step to streamlining your work processes and making every moment count towards your business success.

Knowing how many non-billable hours are being put towards clients will allow you to identify the kinds of clients who require more of that time, allowing you to make prudent decisions around the value of a given product to your business. You might find that a particular type of project would be better billed at a fixed price to better reflect the overall work and effort put in by also digitize your documentation your team. whenever possible to make finding what you need as easy as possible. Recording all the hours you work, whether you bill them or not, will let But why track time at all? Your key you identify work hours which you performance indicators in many perhaps should be billing industries will for, but currently aren’t. include meeting It’s important to the “Ultimately, regardless deadlines, long-term health of any business of your profession, the making sure all hours are billed, to make sure time you spend working and identifying that your is a valuable and finite profitable work is being resource. Don’t make the service areas. appropriately mistake of wasting it by Time tracking compensated. not knowing exactly where increases Keeping good track it is being spent!” productivity by making it clear of your time will help where time is being you to figure out where spent throughout the day. you may be wasting it! You will be The identification of time spent able to identify those non-billable on non-billable work is massively tasks which might be taking up valuable for determining what tasks more of your time than they should, can be outsourced. and make appropriate changes to streamline those processes. Ultimately, regardless of your profession, the time you spend It’s only natural to prefer to be working is a valuable and finite spending your time on work which resource. Don’t make the mistake you will actually charge for. So of wasting it by not knowing exactly how do we try to minimize the where it is being spent! number of non-billable hours we accumulate, without sacrificing the benefits that those hours can provide? One good trick is to try to use as much automation in your FIND OUT MORE... non-billable processes as you can. Reducing the administrative Check out other MinuteDock workload, for example by making stories at: payment reminders automated, > minutedock.com/academy can be a huge time saver. You can