The 3-Step Process to Run Your Agency's Operations Like a Well-Oiled Machine: Part 4 of 4 - Time Tracking

Timesheets to a service business are like electricity for a home; you just need it. Yet timesheets tend to be rushed, inaccurate, or flat out forgotten — ironic, given their importance. 

On a scale of 1-10, how much effort and accuracy do you devote to filling out your timesheet? Studies show that 80% of employee timesheets have to be corrected due to employees' forgetfulness. We're all guilty of rushing through our timesheet right before the deadline, but time tracking is too essential to your agency's profitability to leave off until the very last minute.

Accelo reports that the average professional service business leaks 735.5 hours each year from lack of time tracking for emails, meetings, and overall forgetfulness of having to accurately recall time spent on tasks. This lapse costs businesses $1.6 billion in annual lost revenue! 

Once your planning is solidified, your scheduling is set, it's time to turn your attention to time tracking. With a majority of employees submitting timesheets with errors that need to be fixed by employers, altering the way your team tracks their time is a critical third step to improving your agency's operations.

Timesheets don't have to be a daunting, manual administrative task it's often viewed as. See how Accelo's automated time tracking features simplify and streamline the way your team members handle timesheets. With these functions, you now have the ability to be more accurate, gain more insight into what each key player is contributing, and boost your agency's profitability: 

What Did You Do Last Tuesday? Don't Sweat it With Automation!

In agency life, you're always moving at 100mph. By the end of the week, it's difficult to recall exactly what you were doing each day and how much time you spent on a specific task.

No longer do you need to rely on your memory, or shuffle through your planner and Post-it notes to track your previous tasks. With Accelo, sync your calendar, email, and phone to pre-populate your timesheet. From the meetings you've attended, client emails received and sent out, and places you went based on geolocation, you can automatically capture your details into your weekly timesheet. Here's how:

• Meeting Capture: All of your calendar events made through Accelo, G Suite, or Microsoft Outlook/Office 365 will be automatically pulled into your timesheet, so you don't have to worry about inputting each one manually. 

• Email Capture: About 47% of the annually leaked time is contributed to emails not being tracked. Bring in this revenue by keeping track of all your emails between you and your clients. The time spent on drafting and sending emails will instantly be added to your timesheet.

• Task Capture: Your tasks added through your Accelo account or synced to your G Suite or Outlook tasks will automatically roll into your timesheet, so that's one less thing you need to worry about.

In addition to automated capture, there are plenty of other options to log your efforts with Accelo's timers feature. Log your time with the Log Time button that appears on several screens including Sales, Projects, Milestones, Tickets, and Retainers, enabling you to quickly log time without creating an Activity. You can even add a time entry to one of your Saved Timers from the drop-down menu. There's also the ability to create a new Timer from any page on Accelo, equipping you with many simple solutions to track your work.

Gain Insight into Your Team's Efforts and Become More Profitable

As an agency, the main cost of your business is your employees' talents. When agencies leverage Accelo's automated capture functions, and easy-to-use timers feature for accurate timesheets, they tap into a greater understanding of how their team is spending their day-to-day and can decide where the most time is being spent. 

Take Roberto Ciarleglio, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Contra, for example. He shared how Accelo's time tracking increased the number of billable hours logged at their agency weekly by 15%, boosting their bottom line. 

"With Accelo, we can record time automatically, and that makes life so much easier." Roberto states. "It also means we can bill for more work and get a better insight into the work that's already been done. When we start an activity, the time is automatically recorded and when we send an email, that’s recorded too - so we don’t have to try and remember to log this work at the end of the day."

With Accelo's comprehensive software, transform and enhance the way you run your agency's operations: from the planning stage with the help of top utilized and requested features that adapt to the changes that occur throughout the planning process, upgrading the way you schedule out work that keeps all collaborators happy and on the same page, and eliminates the days of haphazardly running to the finish line in the last few minutes to fill out your timesheets with automated time capture. Streamline your agency operations from planning, scheduling and time tracking with Accelo, try it out today!