“Remember that time is money.” — Benjamin Franklin

No matter what kind or size of business you own, employee and time management are the keys to making your business profitable. The relation between time and paychecks has always been pretty straightforward. We’ve been using clocks and timers to track work for centuries, but as technology evolved, we moved to time tracking software to effectively handle a variety of data coming in.

Time tracking provides powerful insights into your business and lets you trace how various projects or employee tasks are progressing. Once you have clear visibility on how hours are getting spent, you can estimate timelines for future projects and jobs much more accurately and even anticipate if an ongoing project is likely to run off the rails.

Are On-Premise Systems a Relic of the Past?

To this effect, hosting an on-premise time tracking software has been a popular choice. However, traditional on-premise systems are plagued with unexpected expenditures related to maintenance, hardware, and software. The ongoing pandemic proved to be a tipping point for many organizations who had to make radical changes towards managing their daily operations with limited on-premise infrastructure. Rather than optimizing growth and profitability, these companies had to focus their complete attention on business continuity.

Instead, cloud-based time-tracking systems have proven to be an effective way to monitor all employee activities, reduce manual paperwork and administration burden, scale as your needs dictate, and ensure that critical work tasks are functioning correctly. Many businesses have moved towards cloud-based solutions for a more flexible, secure, and cost and time-efficient platform.

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On-Premise vs. Cloud-Based Time Tracking

Here are few significant points on which on-premise and cloud-based time tracking software differ:

• Cost: Investing in legacy software incurs the cost of licensing, installation, maintenance, support, and consultation. Furthermore, when you are looking to scale your business, all these costs rise exponentially. In contrast, a cloud-based model allows enterprises the flexibility to pay as per their consumption or usage of a particular Software as a Service (SaaS). Organizations can choose between a public, private, or hybrid cloud depending on their needs and cost restrictions.
• Mobility: On-premise software can be accessed remotely but often needs a third-party installation acting as a bridge between the user and the solution. This increases the risk of security and communication failures. With SaaS systems, employees can choose to work anywhere, anytime, resulting in higher engagement rates.
• Deployment: You are completely responsible for upgrading and maintaining the on-premise software, which would require having a dedicated team of engineers under your payroll, resulting in additional costs. A cloud-based time tracking service, on the other hand, eliminates the challenges of physically hosting the software. Moreover, maintenance and upgrade costs are already part of the existing cost you pay for the service.
• Backup and disaster recovery: The organizations that own and maintain their software and platforms need to follow stringent processes for data backups and disaster recovery operations. This may require multiple in-house teams to establish and enforce guidelines and practices. With a shift to the cloud, organizations no longer have to spend time and resources on such tasks since cloud service providers offer resilient and sophisticated systems that ensure world-class security, backup, and disaster management.

Prepare Your Business for the Future with Cloud-Based Time Tracking

At Replicon, we have helped organizations make the journey to the cloud for more than two decades. We specialize in offering flexible solutions to organizations depending on their unique needs based on our comprehensive Time Intelligence® Platform. Using an all-encompassing time tracking software like ours means you can:

• Be agile and configurable: A top-tier project time tracking software should be customizable to meet your unique business requirements by leveraging comprehensive end-to-end workflows. Using a mobile application will allow you to capture project time data anytime and anywhere and receive push notifications and alerts on the go. Set up language based on where your project users are and eliminate the need for translation to provide an intuitive user experience.
• Track real-time progress: Prebuilt or customized templates will allow you to capture and track time — both billable and non-billable hours — against various customers, vendors, service partners, and more. You can get a real-time view of project progress, resources, and completed/pending work. All this helps bring transparency into project delivery by streamlining costing, billing, and consolidation processes. Tracking projects in real-time also ensures you have a faster billing cycle and don’t need to wait till the end of the week/month to submit timesheets and generate invoices.
• Speed up payroll and billing cycles: Cloud project time tracking software with a configurable invoicing engine and real-time project tracking means you don’t have to wait till the end of the week or month to submit timesheets and generate invoices. Digital receipts and attachments can be uploaded instantly to reduce lost information and reduce delays in timesheet submission and approval. This helps in faster billing cycles and increased cash flow.
• Manage project time: Your time tracking software should act as a single source of truth for your time data. Accounting tools can use that info for accurate billing and payroll. You can set monthly billable hours targets for employees who enter their time. Having instant alerts and validations will help ensure timely reviews, meaning supervisors and managers can tightly manage project time. A tool with a calendar view will allow you to sync with Outlook, Google, or Apple’s iCal for convenience and increased adoption.
• Enable integrations: You can easily share all project time data with your ecosystem using connectors or web services and also integrate with any CRM, ERP, PM, HRMS system that your business operates. A strong cloud-based project time tracking tool is location independent; therefore, no added costs or IT department requirements.

There’s no doubt that the cloud is the future. The move from on-premise to cloud is the smartest, most cost-effective way to manage all your data and information, which presents unrivaled opportunities that can help your business expand, improve, and generate value.

To learn how Replicon’s Time Intelligence® platform can get you started on the modernization and mobilization of your ERP and backend systems, watch a free webinar.

Your Remote Teams’ Toolkit – Replicon’s Time Intelligence® Platform

Watch Now

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