How Does An Automated Time Tracking Tool Work?

The term ‘automated time tracking’ is buzzing among remote teams. Staying true to their name, they track your employees’ time automatically so they can focus on their primary tasks rather than spending time manually filing timesheets like it’s the 90s. It’s so not!

A lot of managers who’re new to remote work are looking into time trackers to monitor and manage their remote teams and make sure that their productivity doesn’t plummet in the process. One of the most common questions we get from these managers is “how does an automated time tracking tool work?” 

So we thought, why not dedicate a blog to answer this?

Looking into the Mechanics of An Automated Time Tracking Tool Work

Technically, there are two aspects of it:

1. How do you start your time-tracking journey and what’s the process like for employees and managers?
2. How does it help you manage remote teams as a manager?

Using Automated Time Trackers  - The Process

To understand the process, you need to know what an automated time tracker is in the first place. 

An automated time tracker is a tool designed to streamline team workflows by automatically tracking the time spent on tasks, indicating the overall performance of the employees. By remembering employee activity, automated time trackers enable your team to focus on primary value-adding tasks instead of filling out tedious timesheets.   

Now let’s dive into the actual process of using automated time tracking tools:

#1 You sign up and download the desktop app

The first step to using the time tracker of your choice is to sign-up for the platform. There are two ways to do that:

• You get an invite from your team lead/manager
• You sign up to the time tracker’s through the link in the invite 

In the case you get an invite from your manager, you can simply visit the link to reach the sign-up screen and then sign into your time tracker. Once you sign in, you will have the option to download a desktop app which does the heavy lifting to record all the user activity for them. 

The second option is to simply go to the time tracker’s website and sign-up. 

Once you’re in and have completed the onboarding process, you can download the desktop app from there to start tracking time.

#2 Invite users and enter their details 

The next thing you have to do is to invite users (the people in your team, to be precise). During this process, you have to set the working capacity (in hours) and the hourly rate of each team member, which will allow you to calculate their billable hours for invoicing and track their work progress to analyze performance.

#3 Assign projects and tasks to users

Now, it’s time to add projects and create tasks around them!

While adding a project, you need to assign its total capacity (the number of hours it’ll take to complete that project). Some time trackers also allow you to create tasks within the project, which can be assigned to individual employees to make tracking easier on the project and employee level.

Recommended read: 5 Benefits of Time Tracking Solutions for Software & Project Management Teams 

#4 You monitor activity and insights

As a manager using a time tracker, your job is to evaluate employee activity and make sure your team members log their time regularly. This will give you insights into each employee’s performance by monitoring the number of hours an employee worked on each task. Your employees should be able to meet their daily working capacities and complete their assigned tasks in due time. 

 and if your projects are on track to be completed in due time.   

How Do Time Tracking Tools Help You Manage Your Team?

Now that you understand the process behind time trackers, let’s look at how time tracking tools make team management a breeze for you.

#1 They help you manage projects and users

Managing projects can be challenging in itself, but doing that with hybrid or remote teams can make the problem tenfold. You have to track and obtain updates from each employee and then correlate individual performances with the project’s to see if you’re on track. 

And by the time you find out you’re behind schedule on your project, you’re already nearing the deadline, and everything goes haywire from then onward. 

Time trackers remove this entire hassle by providing you a holistic view of your user and task progress. 

All you have to do is access your dashboard and everything from individual performances to the project’s progress is available in a single window. By having a clear view of how individual parts are moving to complete each project, the entire process of  user and project management for remote teams becomes pretty easy.

#2 They Reduce the Risk of Employee Burnouts

Employee burnouts have become fairly common in the modern fast-paced work environments where maintaining a good work-life balance is becoming quite challenging. This severely impacts your team’s productivity down the road. 

Time tracking tools enable you to avoid such burnouts by keeping your employees’ working capacities in check. You can continue to monitor your team’s work logs and make sure no one is exceeding their working capacity. If someone is, you can reduce or manage their workload accordingly when you still have time. This is precisely how timegram works.

#3 Improve productivity 

While the primary task of a time tracking tool is to… well, track time, its core purpose is to improve your team’s overall productivity. They do that by keeping employee performances in check, showing each team member’s logged time against their daily and weekly capacities. 

Employees can use this information to streamline their work and focus more on the primary job tasks. You, as a manager, can use it to identify where employees spend the most and the least bit of their time and plan future projects accordingly. Win-win situation for both!

Where Can I Find a Reliable Time Tracking Solution?

We’ve got one right here!

timegram is a user-friendly time tracking and project management tool with features like a zero-surveillance policy, third-party tool integrations, project and user management modules, productivity insights and reporting and much more.

You can find our full list of features here.

Or opt for a free trial to test timegram for your business.