As a famous quote states, “Progress only starts when you get clear on where you are right now.”

This holds true in project management too. As a team manager or a lead, you may be always struggling to monitor your team members’ progress and the status of various projects? You could be finding it tough to track the productivity and performance of your remote employees. With all this, you need to take care of the project schedule and quality of deliverables. Maybe the responsibilities you have feel overwhelming and you don’t know how to manage your team’s time. The easiest way to handle all this seamlessly is by using a timesheet management software. Such a tool not only helps to do precise calculations of your team’s effort and utilization, but you can also compare it easily with the effort that was planned. Using the best timesheet management software in 2022 will also ensure improved productivity, accountability, and eventually higher revenues.

Timesheet Management – What is it exactly?

When all employees of an organization manage their time entries on a daily basis, the supervisors or project managers can consolidate and analyze them. This helps in enhancing the team’s productivity and utilization and is termed timesheet management. Additionally, these timesheets also enable calculations of employee payroll or to derive accurate invoices for the clients. With advanced technology, there are online timesheets that are much more beneficial than spreadsheets. An AI-enabled, cloud-based timesheet management software comes in handy as your remote employees can also access it from anywhere and at any time. It is tough to remember the exact time and effort spent on various projects and tasks over the week, month, or quarter. Thus, if you implement a timesheet management software, then it becomes easy to enter all such details in a few steps. This information helps project managers to evaluate and analyze their team’s performance, productivity, leave data, and utilization. 

Key Features of a Timesheet Management Software 

Here are the key features of the right timesheet management software that can enable the best use of your team’s time, effort, and resources.

1. Get visibility into actual time consumed on tasks and projects

The timesheet management feature aids to capture what is the actual time spent by your resources on both projects and non-project activities and tasks. This data offers you clear visibility and clarity into resource-wise activities done, in how much time, and then you can compare this information with the effort you planned.

2. Save all significant information in the timesheet

With the timesheet management software, your team members can easily save and record all the important data with their time entries. Data such as hours or effort spent by resources, specific date on which tasks are done, which project, booking (because a project may have multiple bookings), specific task (as a project could have multiple tasks under it), etc. You could also capture the role that your resources are performing, in which location, etc. Recording this kind of detailed information helps in accurate and comprehensive reporting. 

3. Spot any leakages or gaps by analysing planned and actual effort

The right timesheet management software also provides scheduling estimates along with timesheet data. This helps in creating many comparative reports. You can pull out and analyse planned vs. actual effort or resource utilization, capacity, resource availability, and even insightful financial reports. Such detailed reports help in doing a comparative analysis of timelines, total effort spent on a project, and identifying any red flags like resource gaps or leakages.

4. Add additional information as comments with all the time entries

The best timesheet management software such as eResource Scheduler enables the users to add comments or additional information with every time entry about a task or activity. For instance, you can record details of what particular work has been done, if there is any comment you want to leave for the reviewer or approver, etc. When you download the timesheet as a spreadsheet, all the time entries will be exported along with the relevant comments.

5. Colour-coding time entries to distinguish between submitted, approved, and rejected 

Every team member inputs multiple time entries every day, week, or month. Each entry may have a different status, for example, submitted, approved, or rejected. eResource Scheduler’s timesheet management software offers a colour-coding functionality that enables identifying the current status of all time entries accurately. For example, if you see entries marked in green, it means those entries are ‘approved’. Blue colour denotes ‘Submitted’ status, and lastly, entries in Red mean ‘Rejected’. Hence, these colour codes help you understand the status in just a glimpse.

6. Review and approve timesheets according to resources or projects

eResource Scheduler’s easy-to-understand approval screen provides all the required information that a person who is signing off the time entries may need. The supervisor or reviewer can take a quick glance and sign off the timesheet or entries. You can also review and sign off the time entries based on particular resources or projects.

7. Configure your timesheet settings as per resources, projects, or at a global level

A timesheet management software like eResource helps you to configure timesheet settings at various levels. This, in turn, allows standardizing the settings across the entire resource pool and projects. You can also select specific settings for any individual resources or particular projects, as required.

8. Export and import timesheet entries using Excel

Another significant feature of the timesheet management software is that you can easily import and export time entries’ data using excel format. This enables you to specify required data and send it to anyone quickly. You can export the timesheet data for a specific resource or for your team to a spreadsheet in a few clicks. With this tool, you can easily import the time entries by utilizing its inbuilt Excel template.

9. Import or integrate your timesheets with any third-party software

eResource Scheduler enables doing a detailed analysis of timesheets or comparative study or reporting even if using any third-party system or timesheet management tool. To do this, simply import your timesheet data in an Excel sheet or make use of open REST API to create an integration for pulling or pushing that timesheet data.

Top Benefits of a Timesheet Management Software like eResource Scheduler 

1. Track resource utilization and find performance and productivity for your team

Every team member can operate in their own way as people can be motivated differently. As a manager or lead, your objective should be to plan and get all the activities in a project completed in a limited time. Having said that, it’s tough to ensure that all your resources spend their time efficiently and productively. Also, it’s tough for any project manager to keep a track of how the team members are spending their time. The best timesheet management software like eResource Scheduler helps to monitor such data not only on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis. You can get a real-time view of where your resources are spending their time. The tool will highlight any instances where resources are wasting their time on ay non-productive activities or redundant tasks. This enables to set clear objectives and priorities.

2. Calculate cumulative project effort

A timesheet management software helps to estimate the accurate total effort or hours that the entire project will take. This helps project managers to come up with the billable time in a particular project. Let’s take an example here. A project is estimated to take 500 work hours to be completed in two months with say 20 resources. If your team has used 400 hours so far, then there are only 100 hours of effort left to be utilized. Thus, as a manager, you must plan and ensure that all pending work is completed within the remaining hours. If not, your profit margins and revenue will be impacted negatively. eResource Scheduler has features that track your resource utilization, performance, productivity, etc. 

3. Improved resource management and scheduling

With most employees working remotely or in distributed teams, different team members may not be logging in or logging out at the same time or putting in the required effort. But how can the project managers control this remotely? It is tough to control the hours of effort your team puts in or what is the productive output? Thus, implementing a timesheet management software is the safest bet and that saves you money as well. Such a tool also streamlines resource allocation, scheduling, and management, leading to higher profit margins.

4. Create enhanced workflows

A timesheet management software also offers significant data that is needed to evaluate the organization’s existing workflows. You can check the original project timeline that was established by the stakeholders. Then, you can do a comparative analysis with the actual effort or utilization of your team. This way, you can identify any resource gaps or shortages and flag the challenges or areas where improvement is needed. If you can work towards enhancing your workflows, your team members can spend their time more efficiently. It also enables finding suitable solutions for any upcoming issues that could lead to the extra effort being utilized on various projects.

5. Identify exact areas that have the highest resource demand 

After estimating of effort needed for a project, the next step is to determine the total number of employees and types of resources needed. You also need to be sure of what skill set should those employees possess. Here too, it becomes very easy to find the best fit resource with a timesheet management software. Such a tool can offer clear insights into who will be the best for which task or project in terms of optimum value. Therefore, you can easily form your teams with people having the right skill sets and align them where there is the highest demand.

Go for the top-rated Timesheet Management Software – eResource Scheduler Be it to handle a distributed team, to track the performance, and productivity of your resources, or to check the status of projects, implement eResource Scheduler. Your employees can easily fill the time entries for the work they do and track their productivity in real-time. This timesheet management software offers clarity about your resource pool, capacity, utilization, availability, and a lot more. What’s more? You can easily integrate this award-winning tool with other tools that you may be used in your organization. So, if you have any questions, book a free trial and reorganize your timesheet management process.