Everyday business leaders make several decisions intending to achieve desired performance and eventually profits. To make these decisions, leaders need complete visibility into critical project management metrics of their organization. While there are several metrics such as productivity, resource utilization, budget, and cost that can give insights, time tracking is perhaps the only metric that ties into all business-critical metrics.

Accurate timesheets are no longer just a measurement of productivity. It’s a means of discovering both efficiency and bottlenecks for achieving the expected profitability while knowing how much money you lose and earn on a daily basis. This, perhaps, is the biggest advantage of timesheets.

Timesheet data helps business leaders to make an informed decision on:

• Cost efficiency and profitability: How to bid better and reduce project costs while increasing the revenues
• Project and business planning: How to set realistic performance goals, maximize billable hours, and determine which direction to move further
• Operational efficiency: How to plan the day-to-day operations and improve resource utilization to achieve better outputs

In short, timesheet data enables firms to make decisions related to improving productivity, planning for staffing demands, improving operations, learning which clients or projects offer the highest potential profitability, and even qualifying for R&D tax credits.

As per Aberdeen’s latest report, “Implementing time tracking in the Cloud can aid professional services organizations by accurately recording their key revenue source: employee time spent on client projects. Some key features to consider in a time tracking solution are the ability to aggregate time tracking under one roof and zero-touch time harvesting.”

Time Is an Enterprise Asset

Replicon’s vision is to have all businesses treat time as a strategic asset to make the best decisions that eventually lead to improved operational excellence, productivity, and profitability. While professional services firms and other project-based businesses are driven by billable hours, when we interact with our customers, the common challenge we see with time tracking is that time is fragmented in multiple systems, including CRM, ERP, HR, project management, PSA.

But they all do it in different, non-connected, non-shareable ways. Time goes missing because it’s too hard for employees to track it accurately and in real time. Most time-tracking features are not updated to support the remote and hybrid workforce, and the process itself is quite tedious and sluggish while the world is adjusting to the new normal.

These disparate silos of time information do not allow the company to treat time as a valuable asset that drives important business decisions such as resource allocation, cost optimization, expense management, and more. A thousand-person company has around 2 million hours at its disposal in any year.

Aberdeen states that, “The 2nd top project management pressure that stands out for professional services firms is the need to use project resources more effectively at 25%.” Replicon gives organizations visibility into how the time is being spent and enables leaders to track billable vs. non-billable hours for re-evaluating priorities based on accurate time information. With effective time tracking and data analytics, business leaders can connect time spent to outcomes produced and understand and deploy it as an asset.

Replicon’s Advanced Real-time Analytics Drives Better Business Decisions for Large Service Organizations

Accurate time data fuels better business decisions by enabling accurate project bidding and payrolls, complying with regulations, and providing actionable productivity insights.

For instance, managers can leverage historical timesheets in Replicon to predict how long a project could take to complete and use the insight to create bids that can be achieved successfully. As the project progresses, managers can use timesheet data to plan and forecast project metrics to near accuracy to manage delivery in the now. The ability to see how much time was spent on a billable task, the remaining work, and the time required to finish the remaining work helps to avoid over/under allocation of resources and complete projects within the set time and budget constraints.

Replicon’s agile time tracking enables employees to submit their timesheets as and when they reach a project milestone or finish a task, helping accounting teams to create invoices in real time to keep the cash flow positive.

You don’t have to take our word of it. Here’s what our customers have to say about how they use timesheet data to drive better decisions for their enterprises:

“We can build a use case for capital funding, build cost estimates based on historical information, and measure actuals against budgets to manage projects and make proactive decisions if we’re going over budget. Our forecast accuracy is so much higher, and because of that, so is the level of confidence with our information.” — Mike Domansky, Director of IT Portfolio Management & Government Greif, Inc.

“We’ve started to look at our business differently across the board, and time is just one measure to help us better succeed. Whether it’s evaluating team efficiencies, resource utilization against projects, or product development and investment, Replicon has been the tool that we trust to help us improve effectiveness.” — John Young, Chief of Staff (RDO Division), Blackbaud (Read full case study)

Get Started with Our Enterprise-ready Software

Too often, organizations overlook the importance of time in their business – when in fact, it’s a powerful resource that impacts productivity, performance, and profitability. Replicon Time Tracking software provides a real-time, easy to use, and agile front end time management interface to legacy ERP systems including SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, and PeopleSoft, allowing ERPs to play their role while using a purpose-built product to address diverse workforce’s time management needs with ease. Our enterprise-ready solution eliminates the need for custom feature enhancements to the ERP, minimizes change management with plug and play capabilities, maximizes ROI with a true-cloud deployment model, and is highly customizable to business needs enabling quick implementation and adoption.