Running a profitable business means monitoring dozens of moving parts. Time reports are an essential part of ensuring you’re staying on budget with your payroll expenses, but there is a lot more in having accurate time reports.
What is a time-tracking report?
A time-tracking report is an important record of the amount of time your workers spend doing different projects and/or tasks. As technology has evolved, these reports have become more automated, and more helpful, with customizable information based on your needs.
Time management or time tracking reports help you stay up-to-date on the actual dollars you are spending on employees, jobs, and projects, as well as places where you might need to review for improvement.
What are the benefits of time reports?
There are several time tracking benefits when running time reports. Using the right construction apps will help you track time more accurately than if you’re still counting on paper timesheets.
1. Up-to-date with real-time data
When you have crews in the field or multiple jobsites, it’s hard to stay on top of hours and overtime. U.S. companies are required to pay 1.5 times regular pay for any hours worked over 40 based on the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).
Failure to do so, results in non-compliance, and having to pay it when it’s unexpected, can impact your bottom line. When you have real-time data, you can review hours worked as they’re accumulated and avoid unexpected overtime hours. This allows you to adjust schedules as needed, too.
2. Easy to review performance
It’s hard to do employee reviews when many of them work out in the field or at different jobsites. A cloud-based time-tracking solution is one of the best construction apps to review how your workers are doing.
You will have a clear picture of how long your workers are spending on certain jobs. If it takes longer than you feel it should, you’ll have information available to share with the employee to discuss ways they can speed up their job performance. Conversely, you can see when your employees are doing great with the amount of time they are spending on particular tasks.
When employees clock in, they can snap pictures of the work they’re doing which will align with the time they’ve tracked, too, so you can stay on top of your company’s professional reputation by ensuring things are done properly.
3. Increase productivity
Mobile time tracking is not intended to be a punishment for your workers. It helps them feel more productive. When they know their hours are being tracked, they’re more likely to stay focused on their work and not get distracted by outside things.
4. Better work distribution
With multiple crews, jobs, and jobsites, it’s difficult to manage everyone, everywhere. But with accurate time management reports, you can see which employees are working the best at which jobs. This allows you to schedule them accordingly, based on their strengths.
Not only does this distribute the workload to the right people, but it helps ensure you have the best people doing the best jobs. This, in turn, improves your customer service and your reputation as a company.
5. Enhance transparency within the organization
Transparency in construction management is important. Research has found a lack of transparency “leads to communication issues on-site, poor process orientation, and high levels of waste.”
You may not be able to visually see your crews on the job, but you can see their work through their time reports. Conversely, your employees know - based on their time report - how much they can expect on their next payday.
6. Easy to identify areas for improvement
Everyone wants to do their best, but sometimes employees are better at one job than they are at another. And sometimes, an employee is simply not the best fit for your organization. Yet, other times, you may find an employee is exemplary based on their time records, which helps you elevate them in their career by giving them more work to do.
For the former, though, an accurate time report shows you which employees are best at which jobs, and which could use some attention.
7. Increased accountability
If you’re not using accurate time tracking, you may not be getting the right timesheet data. Early or late clock-ins, buddy punching, or simply forgetting to clock in and out, are just some of the ways accountability on the jobsite is decreased.
But with mobile time tracking, you will improve accountability. Your crew must clock in to get their hours recorded. When they know they’re supposed to be at a job at a particular time, they’re more likely to show up when they’re supposed to.
For those who tend to forget to clock in or out, they can be reminded to clock in when they enter a determined location.
8. Easy payroll summary to track labor costs
Average labor costs in the U.S. range from 20% to 35% but service industries such as construction are generally more labor-intensive and can reach as high as 50% or more. Calculating labor costs is complicated, especially if you don’t have accurate time data. Payroll reports remove this problem and make calculating your labor costs simpler and more accurate.
9. Better job costing
It would be impossible to stay profitable without knowing your job costs. Automated time tracking provides you with the kinds of reports you need to do accurate job costing so you can stay successful.
Save Time and Money with ClockShark
Conclusion
With accurate time reports, you’re more able to control what’s going on within your company, whether you have 10 or 100 workers out in the field. The many benefits of having accurate, up-to-date, real-time time reports make time tracking something that all construction and field service companies should adopt.
