Webinar Recap: 4 Ways to Boost Time Tracking & Billing Accuracy
Thanks to all that made it to this week’s webinar, whether you joined us from North America, India, Australia or the UK!
Business leaders all across the globe are embarking on the challenging path to preparing their project-based organizations and teams for the new approach to work. In this webinar, our experts led the discussion with a discussion on some of the top ways these leaders can rationalize costs, optimize productivity, and improve overall efficiency. Check out the recap below with our key takeaways and some top questions. If you’re looking for more details, you can click here to watch the recording of the full presentation.
- Time, one of our greatest strategic assets, is finite. But how much time does an organization actually have? Depends on the user base. An organization with 500 employees will have 1,040,000 hours a year; 5,000 employees have around 10,400,000 hours; 50,000 employees will have a whopping 104,000,000. With this much time at your disposal, you need a way to understand how this time is being used.
- The trouble begins when time data is separated into numerous silos: CRM, ERP, HR, project management, on-premise databases, and more, creating something of a Franken-system. These disparate systems make it difficult to gain real visibility into 100% of an organization’s time, and consequently, understand true project profitability.
- This results in numerous time, costing, billing, and resource management challenges, such as low utilization rates, costing and billing delays, reduced planning capacity, decreased profitability, and more.
- This is further complicated as different personas within the company use different metrics derived from employee time in many different ways – but have no reliable system of record for time, and don’t calculate this data based on 100% of resource time. Instead, many businesses just equate their billable hours to total hours, leading to inaccurate metrics.
- During the session, we held a quick poll asking attendees what they use time tracking data for. The top response was highly relevant: Internal and external client billing.
- To drive business performance, organizations should seek out a flexible platform for project time tracking offering capabilities like:
- Accurate Project Time Tracking to enable project resources to see the exact projects and tasks they are working on to provide accurate inputs around their work, even when they are mobile, and see how that affects utilization and billing in real-time.
- Intuitive Mobile Timesheets App for you and your employees to enable time tracking, approvals, and expense tracking on-the-go with advanced capabilities like geo-tracking, geo-fencing, crew timesheets, GPS or photo-capture as needed.
- Estimates Vs. Actuals Tracking so that you can set estimates for costs, hours, and billing. Easily compare estimates vs. actuals in real-time using dynamic in-context summary charts and comprehensive dashboards to make proactive decisions and manage business metrics.
- Improved Billable Hours & Utilization can help business leaders map revenues to billable hours and set utilization targets at the organization, department, and user level. This added visibility enables resources to be aware of their billable targets, take more responsibility for billing, and improve average revenue per resource.
- Accurate Costing, Billing and Invoicing so that you can manage fixed-bid, T&M or value-based projects. Accurately manage project costs with inputs from your resources and leverage multiple templates, discounting, and add ad-hoc invoice lines included in our flexible invoicing engine to bill with confidence every time.
- Project Forecasting and Budgeting allows you to plan for future resource needs with full visibility into the project pipeline, resources, and skill requirements. Leverage historical information to more accurately predict resource needs for a project while bidding. Analyze resource availability by skillset to proactively hire or retrain resources.
- Powerful Analytics that can provide a graphical representation of your project data and all other business metrics to help you understand trends. Configurable reports give you a consolidated view to easily manage budgets, costs, and resources.
- Seamless Integrations that allow you to plug and play our project time tracking platform and share all project time data with the other solutions in your ecosystem, like CRM, Accounting, Invoicing, ERP, HR and Payroll.
Replicon customers use our comprehensive suite of products to manage a plethora of key business elements including costing, resource utilization, project tracking, and profitability to reduce billing errors, improve invoice turnaround, and more. Read more about some of our happy customers.
Top Questions:
Q: Can users create custom fields to track industry-specific data related to projects or clients?
A: Yes! Replicon allows the creation of custom fields at almost all entity levels. Custom fields can easily be created at the project or client level to track any additional information.
Q: Is Replicon compatible with legacy HR systems?
A: Absolutely. We have an open web services API that helps businesses integrate with any application as part of your ecosystem. Today, customers use us to seamlessly share data with legacy and/or modern HR, Payroll, ERP, Accounting systems and even BI tools of their choice.
Q: How is compliance handled within Replicon?
A: We actually have a team of legal and product experts that are manually tracking every single change in the global labor laws. We have a global pay rule. These get updated in real time, so any time there is a change, it gets updated in our platform. All you have to do to remain compliant is click a little box that says “Yes, I accept” and your compliance will be continued in that pay rule area.
Watch the full presentation:
