Are you worried about drawing up and monitoring budgets due to a lack of insight into hours actually worked?

Do you still make or track budgets without data on hours actually worked? Then you leave money on the table. One of the most common issues in budget allocation is a poor estimate of the hours worked by employees. Automating the time registration process within a company is the answer to accurate budgeting. Wondering how your project will stay within budget?

Cause of poor budget allocation

One of the most common issues in managing a project is a poor estimate of the hours worked by employees. This poor estimate gives a distorted picture and therefore a less accurate budget.

In many companies, time registration is based on guesswork and gut feeling. For many employees who simply work on the payroll, entering timesheets is not part of their daily tasks. The motivation to fill this in lies rather with the fact that their manager asks this in order to know what they have been doing. If it is seen as part of the daily tasks, employees often forget to register activities (e.g. telephone calls or emails…), only complete their timesheets manually at the end of the day, week or month, do not know which activities on which project to book, or simply do not have access to the right tools. All of these obstacles leave a company with money on the table.

In addition, poor time estimation makes it less clear how long tasks actually take. This makes it more difficult to visualize planned time versus actual time spent. This makes planning new projects or customers more difficult and less precise.

Because there are so few accurate measurement points, companies often cannot adjust their time and budgets in time. As a result, projects cannot get back on track before it is too late.

The new technological resources can help to keep projects within budget.

If you do not want to be faced with surprises during the development of a project, using automatic time tracking can already be a large part of the solution. An automated tool registers the hours of employees accurately, in real time and uniformly. All hours worked are accurate and can be retrieved online. Automating the time registration process within a company can therefore have a huge impact on results:

1. Accurate budgeting

Employee timesheets are automatically populated. This eliminates incorrect hour estimates by employees. By better understanding how much time a project actually takes, you can budget more accurately. Not only the data of the current project can be used for budget allocation, but also data from previous (similar) projects.

2. Activity Based Billing

In addition to accurate budgeting, accurate time registration also ensures error-free and complete invoicing. Moreover, a better cash flow is created because customers pay earlier with error-free time registration.

3. Keep a grip on projects

Monitor the time and budget per project or customer. With automatic registration you can therefore immediately intervene where things go wrong (and before it goes completely wrong).

4. Save time

Time registration is often seen as a time-consuming task and is therefore quickly postponed. By using an automatic tool, you gain time that you can now spend on your projects and you do not have to encourage or motivate employees to register.

5. You create trust with customers

If you can provide a time registration based on measured facts and details, you create trust. Which in turn creates a better customer relationship.

6. Better Insights:

An error-free time registration not only offers insights into budgets, but goes much further than that. As a company, you gain more insight into where we lose time, where bottlenecks may be, how good the productivity is… It gives an insight into the actual value and profitability of a project. As a company, no longer feel in the dark and make use of the power of automation.

Lexor is such an automated time registration solution for people who use Office 365. It calculates the time spent by you and your employees using the existing data from your software and proven Artificial Intelligence