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Everyone I know has had the experience of leaving work at the end of the day and wondering where the time went.  Sometimes it is meetings or phone calls or troubleshooting. If you are not using a time tracking mechanism you may never know.

Time tracking has never been a favorite task of employees. For many jobs it is simple because the types of tasks the employee performs is minimal, think of a cashier at a supermarket. For others it can one of dozens of different tasks. Similar to expense management the difficulty comes in deciding how much detail. I recall a contracting job I had at a bank and in their time tracking system there was a time tracking code for entering time tracking data. Will you use a single code for meetings or differentiate between internal meetings and customer meetings? What will be the smallest increment of time used? As it is with expense management there is some trial and error and adjustments you will make along the way,  A good rule of thumb is to base it on what you ultimately want to report on.

Another consideration is what will you do with the data. Implementing a time tracking system, or policy simply to say you have done it makes no sense at all, although I have seen that done. Will it be used for payroll? That is original use of the information (think punch time clocks for hourly workers). Will it be used to determine how much non billable time is being incurred by consultants? Will it be used to keep track of your contractors?

Some other uses of the data might be the following:

• What external projects are profitable?
• Are we recovering all the hours spent on customer projects?
• What do internal projects actually cost?
• How much time is spent in meetings?

Also, if you are looking to outsource specific activities it is important to know exactly how much time you are spending on an activity, like customer support, to determine if it really is a cost effective move. Often what is discovered is that large portions of time is spent on indirect activities.

Perhaps the biggest challenge can be reassuring employees that the information is not being collected for punitive or headcount reduction reasons. You can accomplish this by having one of the initial outcomes of instituting a time tracking system be having to attend less meetings!

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Previous blogs discussed how to get a handle on T&E expenses.  Now that you know what you are spending these dollars on, how can you determine if it is money well spent? Equally as important, how you can these expenses be controlled.

If you are tracking expenses by project and activities you should be able to now see the full costs of these projects, not just the salary costs. It may bring to light efforts that really are not as profitable as they may have seemed.

Do you have a lot of expenses for hotel or car rentals? Perhaps you could you benefit by getting corporate contracts with hotels or car rental agencies? This is especially true if you travel often to the same client or location.

Are there expenses that should be restricted either by amount or frequency.  This can be handled by a good corporate policy.  Often this is a delicate balance between too restrictive and too lax. This generally is adjusted until a happy medium is found.

Are your people doing a lot of traveling for meetings?  Does your company have a virtual meeting platform?  More and more virtual meetings are taking the place of face to face meetings.  Most applications support video, desktop sharing and VOIP. It is just like being there but without the travel hassles!

Do you have a lot of phone expenses?  You may benefit from having a corporate cellular plan.  Many companies offer free calls within the network. If you have international travel some wireless plans allow for adding international coverage for a week or two. You can give them the start date and end date at the same time so you do not have to remember to remove the option. If you have frequent international travel it may make sense to just sign up for the plan and leave it in place.

Finally, does your company spend too much time reporting, approving and reimbursing these expenses. Estimates have been as high as $50 per expense report. If you do not have an automated process in place there are lots to choose from. Many are web based on a subscription basis.  After you have spent the time to understand what your T&E expenses are you can better evaluate the options and choose the one that addresses your particular pain points. 

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