Why Investing in a Unified Time Tracking Should be a Strategic Initiative

Professional services organizations are increasingly battling dwindling revenue, lower resource utilization levels and eroding profit margins. In fact, according to the 2025 SPI Professional Services Maturity Benchmark Report, on-time project delivery has slipped to 73.4%, suggesting that professional services organizations are facing operational inefficiencies, project delays and an array of challenges around execution.

To overcome slipping project delivery rates and shrinking margins, professional services organizations must embrace real-time, data-driven decision-making to stay agile and deliver on time and within budget. While many recognize the value of AI-powered systems, they’re often held back by data silos and fragmented tools—like disconnected time-tracking systems, spreadsheets, and multiple ERPs—that delay decisions and hinder compliance, especially for global teams managing complex, multi-regional regulations.

Timesheets Are the Backbone of Professional Services Success

Accurate time-tracking is the first prerequisite to delivering successful projects for professional services firms. They enable businesses to capture employees’ billable work hours accurately, helping them transform into insights-driven organizations. By closely monitoring time spent across projects, organizations can gain tremendous insights into employee productivity, optimize resource allocation and leverage data-driven insights to make better decisions.

Leveraging a configurable, scalable and agile project time-tracking platform can help professional services firms achieve genuine efficiency and uncover hidden growth opportunities. Timesheets can also help leaders identify over-utilized and under-utilized employees, ensuring that challenges like employee burnout and resource under-utilization are addressed promptly.

Timesheets can liberate employees from keying in their work time data manually, freeing them to focus on more business-critical tasks. Plugging in time lost in administrative tasks can snowball into hundreds of extra productivity hours for enterprises, leading to better resource utilization and improved revenue per employee.

The Benefits of a Unified-Time Tracking Platform

A common misconception about time-tracking software is that it only captures ‘in’ and ‘out’ times. Time tracking is capable of a lot more. In addition to tracking employee time, a unified time-tracking platform allows users to track and monitor tasks, projects and resources. Organizations can gain a comprehensive view of their existing workflows and analyze them to identify existing efficiency gaps. Therefore, the insights generated by time tracking help automate workflows across an organization for consistency and efficiency. Additional benefits include:

1. INCREASED EFFICIENCY FROM AUTOMATION

Some unified time-tracking solutions like Deltek | Replicon incorporate AI features to automatically capture work and time data across all the digital apps they use. This results in more accurate timesheets and saves valuable time for employees and an increase in profitability – as much as 15% for large organizations.

2. ACCURATE CLIENT BILLING

Timesheets capture employees’ work time data automatically, allowing businesses to capture and record all billable hours incurred, making it easier to invoice clients accurately. This streamlines invoicing processes, plugs in revenue leakages and prevents organizations from over or undercharging clients. Thus, timesheets help deliver profitable projects, while enabling solid client relationships.

3. STREAMLINED PAYROLL

Similar to client billing, organizations can drive their payroll processes by using the data generated by a time-tracking system. A time-tracking system with robust validations for accurate timesheets can be immensely valuable to the payroll department in ensuring correct wage distribution. Such a system is inherently better than manual spreadsheets and paper-based ledgers.

4. ROBUST ANALYTICS

Accurate time tracking provides valuable data and insights into how employees allocate their work hours and whether or not they are handling critical projects or routine administrative tasks. This enhanced visibility allows for better productivity management by providing a clearer understanding of task demands, enabling more strategic resource allocation. With comprehensive insights into all activities, leaders can develop strategies and ensure they optimize each resource for maximum efficiency and performance.

5. HIGHER UTILIZATION RATES

A time-tracking solution provides insights into an employee’s time spent on various tasks. This information enables project managers to create more effective schedules to ensure optimal resource utilization. It also helps verify billable and non-billable tasks and deliver comprehensive coverage, enhancing resource utilization levels.

6. REDUCED COSTS

A robust time-tracking solution allows firms to identify areas where inefficiencies and revenue leaks exist. This enables project leaders to proactively address them and lower costs to improve project margins.

A Real Life Example: How Fujitsu Reduced Their Client Billing Time by 90% with a Unified-Time Tracking Platform

CHALLENGE: 

As a top global IT services provider, Fujitsu requires highly accurate effort estimates to scope and plan client projects effectively. With a workforce of over 100,000, they also needed a time-tracking system intuitive enough for both tech-savvy and non-technical users.

Their internal time and expense tracking system—built years ago—relied on manual Excel forms and email, creating delays, errors, and compliance challenges. As the company grew, the system couldn’t keep up, and a mounting backlog of manual checks highlighted the urgent need for a more efficient, scalable solution.

SOLUTION:

“Immediately after we rolled out Deltek | Replicon, our users verified the system’s ease of use. It is also easy for the management team to ask for accuracy in the data entered,” said Nicola Zarrilli of Fujitsu. “The system is so flexible. Depending on how you set it up, you can achieve different levels of functionality and usability. For instance, if you realize at a later stage that you made mistakes, it is very easy to correct them without affecting (if not at all) the system too much and the data’s history,” said Zarrilli.

Results for Fujitsu

• Decreased their time and expense approval process from days to minutes
• Reduced their billing cycle by 90% (from days to minutes)
• Historical project reports allow for accurate project costing and budgeting
• Reports are now created using a simple reporting tool
• Enhanced project management due to better visibility into employee productivity
• Estimates and activities are now completed accurately and on time due to the platform’s ease of use

How Deltek | Replicon Can Help

Deltek | Replicon’s modern, mobile, secure, configurable and scalable time-tracking platform seamlessly captures 100% accurate time data for billing, costing, payroll and project financials. The unified AI-powered platform leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to streamline processes, drive operational efficiencies, improve productivity, reduce billing cycles and revenue leakages and ensure timely project delivery within budget.

Professional services organizations can benefit from its seamless plug-and-play integrations with multiple ERP, CRM systems and project management systems. This enhances the speed of delivery within their current enterprise ecosystem. Plus, Deltek | Replicon’s time-tracking platform offers a centralized repository of compliance-related information, which simplifies managing and meeting compliance obligations. It supports time, schedule, time off and payroll across 76+ countries, 147+ jurisdictions and 30+ languages.