Time Tracking Software and Apps in 2024

What is Time Tracking Software?

Time tracking software is a computer application that helps in tracking the hours spent on every task. Tracking software is important to estimate the work hours for every project, which is often used at the time of invoicing and billing. The estimated time for any task can be further compared with the actual work hours. This way, timesheet software makes it easy to find loopholes in the process and assess the performance of your team members. It also helps in analyzing the complexity of different tasks, so that resources can be allotted accordingly.

Time tracking software is primarily used for tracking work hours involved in any task or project. Timesheet management systems are often relied upon for other time management capabilities such as tracking attendance, doing performance reviews aside from calculating billable hours. Small or Large Businesses use time tracker free and paid ones for the visual breakdown of working hours into time offs productive hours and offline hours.

How Does Time Tracking Software Work

Besides timekeeping, the software comes in handy for monitoring team activities, setting hourly rates, and checking who is currently working on which project. All this data gets synced online so you can access such information easily from anywhere. 

Time management software provides features such as automatic screenshots, shift scheduling, budgeting control, automated timesheets, and invoice control. Established businesses and freelancers take the help of paid and free timesheet software solutions, as the entire monitoring of work hours helps increase productivity.

Types of Time Tracking Software 

Project management software: Project management software helps with time tracking, setting project timelines, and budgets. Based on the estimated time and the actual time, invoices can be generated and shared with clients.

Employee attendance software: Attendance management software for employees is a major module of the time management software system. Time attendance software helps in tracking the sign-in and sign-out time for both in-office and offsite employees.

Timesheet tracking system: Timesheet management software helps in automatically updating the attendance and work hours of every employee on the online timesheet for invoicing, billing, and project timeline estimation.

Advantages / Benefits of Time Tracking Software 

Employee time reporting software tracks the lifecycle of a project. Effective time tracking for any task of projects helps with accurate billing and expense management. Another benefit of using time tracking software is it helps with employee attendance tracking. 

Conversion of hours into invoices: An online time tracker helps convert work hours dedicated to a project into invoices. Due to hectic schedules, if you forget to punch in, employee time tracking software calculates such unbilled project minutes and hours for turning them into invoices. 

Login easily from anywhere: This feature is especially relevant in current times where organizations are opting for remote working as the new normal. Otherwise, also the feature is designed for teams operating from remote locations so that every member can work on a project seamlessly. All you need is login details and start clocking in/out from any computing device from anywhere. 

Tracking team members' schedules: Team managers to find time tracking tools convenient for checking the work hours of each employee. Employee tracker software keeps a tab on the progress of work and attendance for generating monthly reports. All such reports are available in real-time and team managers can stay updated about the team's attendance and work status. 

Insights for planning employee hours: Employee insights are important for understanding how your team members spend their work hours. Such insights from time tracking tools help with task allotment. Time tracker also helps with applying correct billing rates as well as optimizing the utilization of work hours. 

Increased productivity with easy collaboration: Employee attendance tracking systems bring employees under one single system for helping them focus on tasks and prioritizing their activities accordingly. Besides, you can also use the software for developing custom workflows, dividing work into organized chunks, and assigning task duties to multiple employees. 

Organized contact details of remote employees: With the help of time and attendance software, you can access contact details of your employees anytime the need arises. Time tracking software makes communication processes as smooth as possible. 

Automated time capture: Online time tracking software is used for tracking the work hours spent on any project. It makes the invoicing, billing, payroll and wage calculation processes fast and accurate. 

Transparency in billable hours: The timesheet tracking system offers data insights and metrics, which in turn supports easy and accurate tracking of billable hours.

Accuracy in time estimation: Time software makes it easy to estimate the deadline for any task and analyze the possible hurdles to timely project completion.

Empowered & engaged employees: Employees get tasks to perform based on their skills. Also, the estimated timeline is shared. With transparency and accountability, employees can perform exceptionally well.

Most Common Features of Time Tracking & Management Software

Breaking down the work hours into projects, tasks and clients helps businesses help optimize productivity. With these essential features, time tracking software ensures seamless task management.

Utilization calculator: Utilization calculator is used by businesses for diligent resource planning, which in turn is important for increasing employee productivity and improving profitability margins. Utilization calculator helps get an overview of project budget, employee time offs/vacations, billing rates, etc. With this information at hand, you can allocate resources accordingly for efficient project management.

Task management: For better results, organize tasks with timesheet software's task management capabilities. You can complete projects on time by creating tasks, subtasks, and checklists using Gantt charts offered by timesheet management systems. You can also duplicate repetitive tasks aside from using these charts for visualizing the progress of all your projects.

Agile project management: Time tracking software helps organizations by providing a single collaborative platform for assigning projects to team members, sharing notes, and sending notifications. Streamlining projects become easy with predefined templates designed for organizing workflows. You can also create your own templates and duplicate those for managing workflows.

Budget & time management: Forecasting project delivery is easy with employee time tracking software. Approving team timesheets and tracking projects till their final submission, whatever be the task, a business can't afford to run into losses. Timesheet management systems send automatic alerts every time there is a potential cost overrun to help companies prevent potential losses.

Organizing & tracking expenses: Use employee tracker software for recording expenses, assigning these to different members, linking them with specific projects and billing clients. The software generates billable versus non-billable reports to help business owners keep a track of where they are spending money. Such expenses can also be categorized into various categories and subcategories for easily organizing and tracking expenses.

Employee timesheets: Employee timesheets are offered by timesheet management systems to help employees monitor their work progress. Employee timesheets are attached to personalized dashboards and employees can use these to assign work hours for specific tasks and projects.

Real-time project visibility: Time management software is critical for managing employees’ workload to ensure that employees are not stressed with tasks. You can also use the software for increasing employee utilization to see there is neither any over-servicing nor long non-billable hours. All this is possible due to the features like project performance reports and client budget management.

Automatic time-tracking: Time tracking is the key to boosting productivity at work. Instead of manually clocking the in and out time, time tracking tools automatically calculate your work hours. The application works by recording first the time you switch on the computer and the time you switch it off. Auto screenshots: Auto screenshots are taken by employers to check what each individual employee is doing on his screen. Timesheet software takes automatic screenshots of an employee’s system to track instances of unproductive activities. The feature is especially useful for remote teams.

Billable rates and time: Employee attendance software lets you set billable rates and time so that invoicing the clients and calculating the wages get easy.

Activity reports: Tracking system for employees helps in creating activity reports related to the work done so far. You can get customized reports for the tasks performed every day or week. Accordingly, it helps analyse the overall productivity and process loopholes.

GPS tracking: Employee time tracking software makes it easy for employees to clock-in/clock-out from any location so that the time spent on work sites can be recorded for timesheet management and payroll purposes.

Staff scheduler: Tracking software supports a staff scheduler for tracking employee attendance and tasks.

User management: This feature of time management software helps in creating user groups based on their skill sets. Accordingly, tasks can be assigned, and the timeline can be set.

Accurate invoicing: Clients can be billed accurately and with transparency as per the estimated billable hours. Based on the hours spent on any project and the rate determined beforehand, clients can be billed without any dispute.

What to Consider When Buying a Best Time Tracking Software?

You can take a cue from some such technicalities enlisted below to make a good decision regarding which time management software to buy. 

1. Budgeting control: Budgeting control is required for proactively tracking and managing budgets by the hour, cost, and total amount basis. To avoid budget overrun, you can also use built-in key performance indicators within clocking software for staying on budget. 

2. Shift scheduling: The planning shift schedule of your team is easy with paid and free timesheet software. All you got to do is select the starting and ending time of each shift while at the same time calculating the numbers of hours required for each shift. You can now save this as a recurring shift or for future use.

3. Invoicing: Time and attendance software is an excellent resource for creating invoices and even tracking overdue invoices. These applications display delay data for average payments so that reminders can be sent to such clients. You can also prepare recurring invoices for sending them automatically to all the clients.

4. Document title tracking: Businesses, agencies, freelancers, managers, and other such professionals use employee time tracking software for documenting title track. The software functions by noting the title of every document, subject line of each email and names of chat groups to assess the amount of time spent in each of these activities. File format or email service platform isn't an issue, as online time tracker works with Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, PDF, Word, Excel, etc.

5. Detailed performance reports: The report section of the employee time tracking software highlights performance statistics for each employee. This is based on the number of work hours, arrival/departure timings or clocking in/out timings, offline time, and productivity at work. These detailed performance reports are available in the reports section only.

6. Payroll integration: The integration of the timesheet tracking system with payroll software helps in generating salaries for employees on an hourly basis.

7. Compliance requirement: Every industry has to follow certain wage-related compliances. The time management software you choose must send alerts if the work hours of any employee exceed beyond the set standards. This will help in avoiding penalties.

8. Mobile accessibility: Time attendance software with mobile accessibility is important in case you want to track the work hours of a remote team and field employees.

9. Offline functionality: There would be occasions when the internet bandwidth is very low. Offline functionality will help in tracking work hours, especially in remote locations.

Relevant Trends for Time Tracking Software 

Cloud-based Time Tracking Software: Businesses adopt the deployment model based on their requirements. The different types of deployment models have made it easy for organizations to choose the right solution based on their work rules, regulatory compliances, and working environment.

AI-Based Face Recognition: A tracking system for employees that is based on face recognition technology is helping team leads in calculating the worked hours for every team member accurately. Face recognition ensures accuracy in time and attendance management and prevents fraud in the attendance data like buddy punching.

AI & Chatbot: Chatbots integrated with time software can interact directly with employees to track their task status. Chatbots also update the task status on timesheets for the future reference.

How Time Tracking Software Helps with Project Management

• Time tracking of projects and tasks is easier with employee tracker software. Project managers can plan work schedules, generate time estimates, track work progress, and bill their clients accurately.
• Calendar integration is another supporting feature that makes it easy to create time entries for different stages of project completion.
• The data generated by timesheet software can be easily exported into a file format of your choices such as PDF, Excel, or CSV.
• The project dashboard offers visual data for checking progress in work. You can also use this feature for estimating the time required for finishing any project.
• Clocking software also offers billable rates that can be assigned to all the tasks. Once assigned, fair compensation is guaranteed for each task completed.
• Track time across multiple projects and generate accurate invoices easily.