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Why is Time tracking so Important for Accountants?

It’s important for any business to be aware of how they are spending their labour resources. After all, our skilled work hours are a valuable commodity! When it comes to time management for accountants, being able to provide a clear and organized data set for how you are spending your time is crucial. Whether it be for billing, for time management and organisation, or for providing your clientele with a comprehensive overview of how their money is being spent, the right accounting time and billing software can be a godsend. Time tracking will help any accounting business to streamline their work and billing processes. Not only that, but the right accounting timesheets can also increase work efficiency and provide tools for better time resource management.

How can Time Tracking Tools Benefit Accountants?

We all know the basic idea of what time tracking is, but what are the benefits for accounting firms? Every industry has unique needs to fulfil and can use time tracking to do so in various ways. For highly skilled work, such as in accounting, being able to use time tracking to keep on top of productivity and reduce admin time through increased workflow efficiency can save valuable time resources as well as minimise costs. The right time tracking tool for accountants will let you keep detailed data on how you and your team spend your hours, letting you maintain employee oversight without needing to be looking over anyone’s shoulder, and letting you get on with the critical skilled work which only you can do.

Even better, you can use accurate time tracking and billing to make sure your clients have accurate and up to date bills. You’ll have the ability to show you client in detail exactly where you are spending the time they are paying for, allowing you to attain a high level of trust and satisfaction with your customers.

1.      Allows You to Keep Track of Employee’s Hours

One thing which can detract from a skilled worker’s time, particularly when operating small businesses, is spending unnecessary hours on work which falls outside of their high value skillset. For small business owners, this can often happen where administrative tasks and providing managerial oversight for the team can cost valuable time resources which would be more profitably spent on the high value, high skill work for which you earned your diploma. Being able to use accurate and simple time tracking to keep abreast of your teams work hours let’s you spend less time worrying about what everyone else is doing and more time focused on getting your core work done!

2.      Get a Better Idea of Costs

When estimating and calculating the costs of running your business, accuracy is absolutely essential. Accurate time tracking will let you build up a strong dataset from which you can make highly accurate estimates on the time and human resource requirements of any given task or project. Having accurate cost estimates allows you to set your billing rates appropriately, as well as provide your clientele with clear and accurate estimates for work completion. Remember, the work you do doesn’t just cost money – the time you have is just as important as a budgetary consideration.

3.      Bill Clients More Accurately

There’s no worse feeling than when your client comes back to you with a furrowed brow to question aspects of their bill, except perhaps for the feeling that comes after when you realise the bill is inaccurate! Time tracking and billing software let’s you take out the uncertainty factor – you can itemize your bills and show exactly where each charge is coming from and the hard-working hours that have been put into providing your client with the high-quality work you’ve done.

4.      Sync With Your Accounting Software for Efficiency

The convenience and efficiency of streamlined integration between the apps you use for your time tracking, billing and general accounting cannot be overstated. Being able to integrate your time tracking software with popular accounting apps let’s you automate large parts of the billing process. You can use time tracking data to automatically generate and populate invoices, make small adjustments as necessary, and get through your billing processes faster than you would have thought possible, all while maintaining improved billing accuracy due to the time keeping data you gathered while working.

How MinuteDock’s Time Tracking Software Stands Out from the Rest

Most time tracking software options are trying to do too much. They want to cater to as wide an audience as possible, and often provide features which either don’t have enough depth to be useful to specific industries or business sizes, or which are superfluous and do nothing besides creating unnecessary clutter and confusing the user experience of the app.

What sets MinuteDock apart is a focused design – we’re not going to pretend that one size fits all. MinuteDock is designed specifically for professional service-based industries and suits the needs of businesses like accountants, bookkeepers, and lawyers. Our focused design allows to make sure we are able to fulfil the needs of these industries while also providing a platform which is easy to set up, use and navigate. MinuteDock is here to save you time, not occupy more of it!

 

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