How Small Businesses are Leveraging AI-powered Time Tracking to Maximize Revenue

Today’s business landscape is fraught with significant headwinds for small and mid-size firms. Challenges like economic uncertainty, increasingly competitive markets, and rapid technological advancements are hampering business growth. We can see this reflected in the most recent Professional Services Benchmarks Report (below) that shows a decrease in growth, utilization and profitability across the board. It can be particularly challenging for small businesses to navigate these hurdles as they lack the resources available to larger organizations. However, overcoming these difficulties is not an impossible task.

The key lies in focusing on utilization rates which play a major role in the growth and success of an organization. For small businesses, it is vital to establish utilization rate benchmarks backed by accurate time-tracking systems. Without them, it can be difficult to address the issues that cause poor utilization, like declining productivity and inefficient resource allocation.

However, traditional time tracking systems can create more inefficiencies, such as error-prone data, a lack of real-time visibility, and reduced productivity, than they solve, which can be an issue for small businesses with limited resources. By automating the time-tracking process, small businesses can expect significant improvements to their utilization rates while also overcoming other hurdles.

How AI-Powered Time Tracking Benefits Small Businesses

Poor resource utilization hinders an organization’s ability to deliver projects on time and within budget. In turn, this eats into their profitability and revenue. With AI-powered time tracking systems in place, small businesses can effectively identify and address several key challenges that limit resource utilization rates. Here are some of them.

Eliminating Siloed Systems

Too often, businesses end up building siloed systems and processes as they keep adding to their ecosystem without a plan. This is particularly common as small businesses grow. Unfortunately, siloed systems are notoriously inefficient. By spreading data across disparate systems, businesses lose real-time visibility into their data and have no way of determining which source of data is the actual truth. It also prevents organizations from generating actionable insights to drive their business.

By replacing all disparate time tracking systems with a unified AI-powered solution, organizations can break down these silos. Such solutions offer a single source of highly accurate information as they automate the time capture process. With increased accuracy and visibility into time data, small businesses can make informed decisions to drive their growth effectively.

Improving Billing and Payroll Accuracy and Speed

Small businesses typically lag behind their peers in terms of digital maturity and lack the integrated systems to operate efficiently. This often results in multiple touchpoints when handing off data between departments, which can result in issues such as inaccurate billable hour tracking. As billable hours are a key component of billing and payroll calculations, inaccurate time capture can lead to major concerns for the business. These concerns include error-prone client billing, loss of client trust, revenue leakages, and even labor law non-compliance penalties.

With AI-powered solutions automating the time capture process, small businesses can minimize such risks. Solutions such as Deltek | Replicon can help assemble pre-filled timesheets for employees to review and submit by automatically collecting time and work data from their existing work applications and tools such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack and Adobe. As a result, small businesses are able to improve the accuracy of the time data captured and process it correctly for use in other systems such as billing and payroll tools.

Moreover, the automated processes help speed up the overall functions, promoting greater efficiency within the business. The system can collect accurate employee time data from various sources and assemble pre-filled timesheets for your employees to review and submit. This saves the valuable time of employees, ensuring up to a 10-15% increase in productivity.

Increasing Project Profitability and Productivity

Manual time tracking systems are a time-suck. Employees often spend considerable time filling, reviewing, correcting, and approving traditional timesheets instead of focusing on their billable work. This hurts productivity and can also demotivate employees, which hinders efficient project deliveries. Moreover, these systems don’t offer real-time visibility or insights necessary for making informed decisions on project or resource management. This can lead to issues like scope creep, overblown budgets, and delayed deliveries as leaders are unable to get the data needed in real time to keep projects on track.

By automating time tracking with AI-powered solutions, businesses can free up their employees to focus on billable work. Moreover, it also provides leaders with a clear view of project time spent in real time, giving them the insights they need to manage projects and resources proactively. The result is an uptick in productivity and billable hours as well as an improvement in project outcomes. This reflects positively on the bottom line, improving project profitability and productivity.

Contoural, a consulting firm based in California, was able to achieve similar results after implementing Deltek | Replicon’s AI-powered time-tracking solution. They were able to save nearly 30% of their consultants’ time, freeing them to focus more on billable work and giving them the opportunity to generate more revenue.

Accessing Predictive Analytics and Actionable Insights

Given their limited resources, small businesses need to make the optimal use of those resources to maximize their revenue potential. However, relying on outdated project information makes it difficult for leaders to do so. Stale data leads to poor decisions, which can affect project outcomes, thereby limiting revenue generation and profitability. Instead of staying a step behind, small businesses must unlock the full potential of their limited resources by making data-driven decisions.  

Data-driven decisions are only possible when business leaders have actionable insights and access to live data. AI-powered time tracking solutions can help organizations leverage capabilities like predictive analytics. These solutions will have access to historical project time data which they can analyze to generate actionable revenue-driven insights. These systems can help identify patterns and trends to bring about improvements in project and resource management for better outcomes.

Deltek | Replicon’s Unified AI-powered Time-tracking Platform 

Deltek | Replicon’s unified AI-powered time-tracking solution can help small businesses achieve significant efficiency by streamlining the time capture process. It offers AI-powered timesheets, powered by ZeroTime™, that helps employees automatically capture work time data from over 100 work applications.

It also provides advanced capabilities to help leaders accurately track work time data, utilization rates, and other key metrics to make data-driven decisions. As a result, small businesses can add up to $26,500* in annual revenue per employee Learn more about Deltek | Replicon’s solution below.