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

The tech industry is extremely face-paced. Modern businesses need to be on their toes to launch products or introduce new features when the demand is high and the market is unsaturated, so they can extract maximum ROI – it is all about the right timing!

If you miss deadlines and delay product releases, your competitor might take this opportunity to grab a significant share of the market, leaving you with crumbs worth of profits. But the problem is that it’s easier said than done. 

Software development and project management are complex tasks that require input from multiple teams working coherently to build or improve a product. With so many people involved, even the slightest of hiccups can cause immense time delays. There is just so much that could go wrong:

• Unending bugs and coding errors
• Product release  not up to the client’s expectations
• Staging errors 
• Poor UI and UX
• Incompatibility over different devices
• Budget constraints 

This is followed by hours of quality testing and bug fixes, only to have the whole cycle start again.

This becomes an even greater matter of concern if you’re a software development or project management agency. There are several projects going on simultaneously with multiple deadlines to meet.

So what measures do you, as a manager, should take to ensure your team is able to successfully complete projects within their due timeline?

The answer is accurate time tracking to power your management needs.

Recommended for reading: What are the Essential Features in a Time Tracking Solution?

Time Tracking Solutions for Software Teams

While time trackers won’t prevent or fix those bugs for your team, they can help in many other ways to conquer projects. Here is how time tracking solutions benefit software teams:

#1 Saves you from potential financial losses

Fudging hours can cost your business a lot of money – 7% of your payroll according to the American Payroll Association. Your company’s financial losses can go higher if you’re unable to track the actual cost of your project, which leads to inaccurate billing and invoicing. 

The real question is, why does your team fudge hours in the first place? 

Well, for one, they might be tampering with the timesheets to make up for all the lost hours. But that’s mostly the case if they’re dealing with employee burnout symptoms (or there might be a few slackers in your team).

Recommended for reading: Employee Burnout Here is How Effective Resource Planning Can Help

Another reason could be that your employees are unable to recollect what they did a couple of days ago. Imagine logging hours on a tiring Friday afternoon; they will be resorting to their best guesswork to fill out the timesheets.

One solid reason why your team may not be logging hours correctly is because they don’t have the room to spend those additional thirty minutes filling timesheets. 

With time tracking solutions for software developers, your team doesn’t have to worry about recording activities throughout the day. The automatic time-tracking mechanism allows them to pick all the work-related data and share it with you within minutes. 

This benefits you and your team in more-than-one ways:

1. They get more time to focus on their primary tasks
2. Micromanagement goes out the window since you no longer have to keep reminding them to fill out timesheets
3. They can work on multiple tasks simultaneously and later group them against each project to find out the time they spent on it

Since your team members will be done with this inevitable task in minutes, there is a higher chance your development team will not procrastinate sharing time-logs, which will allow you to calculate accurate project costs and share invoices with your clients accordingly.  

#2 Makes billing and invoicing hassle-free

Keeping track of billing and invoicing is a manual, non-value adding task that can take many hours, especially if you’re working with multiple clients. Having freelance developers in your team takes the challenge up a notch as you have to make sure you calculate billable hours on both fronts (freelancers and clients). 

There is just so much that can go wrong like:

• Sending duplicate invoices to clients even after you have received the payment (embarrassing, right?)  
• Failure in calculating billable hours accurately for each project, which leads to overcharging (in which case the client will part ways) or under-charging (you don’t get paid according to the time you spent on the project)
• Inability to estimate project costs which can lead to inaccurate quotes for new clients and potentially negative ROI

Time tracking software for project managers resolve all of these concerns by allowing you to calculate accurate billable hours against the services rendered. For instance, with timegram, you can insert the hourly rate into the system and it will automatically calculate the total number of hours spent on completing the project using the data collected from the time tracker. 

This will allow you to calculate billable hours, the resulting project costs, and generate invoices with a few clicks. It also keeps track of the clients you’ve already billed, making sure you don’t mistakenly send multiple invoices to the same client. 

Recommended for reading: Why Modern Organizations Need Time Tracking Software

#3 Keeps track of your team’s working capacity

Time tracking solutions for software teams allow you to take new clients onboard without overworking your existing resources. Suppose you pay $50/hour to your employees and they make X% progress in an hour for a particular project. You can use this data to calculate the number of resources you’d have to allocate to the new project, and whether your current team can handle the additional work without overburdening them. 

The good news is that all of this data is readily available in your time tracking tool. Once you have a clear picture of your potential project costs and required man hours, you can prepare quotes, set project milestones, and welcome new clients onboard.

In addition, time tracking solutions for project management give you insights into individual and team capacity to see which developers have enough time to focus on the new project. 

For instance, timegram’s visual dashboard instantly tells you about each employees’ capacity, showing who has some room to spare for more work . 

No more guesswork, for sure.

#4 Makes project management a breeze

Managing a software development team in an agency is challenging. You have several projects to oversee, meet deadlines, and satisfy your clientele to scale your business. This means that you want to divide larger projects into smaller milestones and ensure that you’re always on track to meet deadlines.

Time tracking software for project management allows you to manage several projects efficiently, track progress of  each task, monitor employee capacities, and allocate work all through a single platform. 

#5 Keep tabs on employee performance 

Software development teams work in sprints and generally follow the agile methodology, where every minute of their time is tied to a task. This means that  they don’t have much time to spare for daily time-logging, and you need those logs to determine their performance (and bill your clients accurately).  They need to write lines and lines of code, design algorithms, merge code versions, troubleshoot, debug, and do so much more; And that too for multiple projects.

With so much going on, it is hard to keep track even for employees themselves, let alone managers. Modern time tracking solutions for software developers allow your team to submit work logs within minutes by simply reviewing the Highlights of their day and eliminating any personal data (like YouTube music, or that half an hour of gaming) that they don’t want to share with you. 

Once you have this data, you can use it to identify top performers and slackers in your team, or to determine projects where individual employees take the most and the least time. 

Let’s assume you have two developers on your team, Mark and Phoebe. Mark is good at working on the backend of applications, where he delivers more work in an eight-hour shift. On the other hand, Phoebe is an expert in frontend protocols like creating engaging UIs and UXs, and is able to complete such tasks easily.

You can put both employees on the same team where one looks after the frontend and the other manages the backend tasks. This will:

• Ensure you are assigning the most efficient resource for the respective task, expediting the development process
• Deliver higher quality output with a minimum number of bugs and code revisions 
• Guarantee higher individual productivity which will free up your resources for more tasks

In a Nutshell 

Time trackers are built for software teams and people managing them. They eliminate the chore of manually maintaining timesheets from the already-busy routine of developers while making it easier for you to track progress, capture billing hours, send invoices, and do a whole lot more.

It’s a win-win for both employees and managers.

timegram's the Right Time Tracking Software for Developers

Our time tracking and resource management tool is designed keeping software team managers in mind. timegram packs all the benefits that will make project and team management less of a headache for you by allowing you to:

• Manage multiple clients and their deadlines
• Ensure outputs at full capacity
• Reduce time spent on generating and sharing invoices with clients

What more do you get with timegram?

• Develop business-specific KPIs to gauge employee performances
• Gamification to promote a healthy competition among developers
• Zero-surveillance policy to respect employee privacy, enhance accountability, and increase job satisfaction

Experience all of these benefits for yourself; opt for our free trial today.