As a team manager, you probably understand the importance of time tracking and billing. You will want to ensure that your team members are working efficiently and that your billing process has a streamlined flow. However, it’s just not possible for one to manually run these errands efficiently. Here is the best time and billing software for tracking the team’s time to ease time tracking. This article talks about time and billing software, from what they’re to the benefits of integrating one and some excellent software to help you boost the efficiency of your workflow. But before that, let’s understand,
How are Billable Hours defined?
Billable hours are defined as the number of hours a company has devoted to working for a client. It can be calculated on a per-project basis, or it can be a general calculation. To calculate billable hours, you must first track the number of hours employees work on each project. For this, you can use time tracking software or manually by having employees submit timesheets (which is quite tedious, though). Once the hours have been tracked, you can determine the hours charged to the client. The charges depend on the type of project, the contract the company has with the client, and the company’s policies.
What are the inefficiencies in measuring it manually?
Measuring billing hours and time can become overwhelming when trying to do it manually. Several inefficiencies are expected to happen:
It can be difficult to accurately track the hours worked on a project, especially for each employee. It can lead to over-billing or under-billing clients. Manually tracking billable hours is time-consuming and stressful. It requires great effort and can distract from working on projects. It includes a paper trail that can become daunting to manage and have chances of being lost or misplaced. You may feel stressed while ensuring that employees accurately report their hours worked. Determining the profitability of a project can be a little challenging as well. When you have a lot on the table, calculating each project’s billing rate can lead to inaccuracy in invoicing.
What are the Major Benefits of Time and Billing Software?
There are a handful of perks and billing software that you wouldn’t like to miss. It includes:
Improved Accountability
By keeping track of your billable hours, you can invoice your clients accurately and ensure that you are paid for all your work. The software can help you track expenses. This information can keep your budget on track and ensure you are not spending more than you can afford. Moreover, you can easily manage multiple projects at the same time. It can help to keep the projects on track and ensure timely delivery.
Streamline Payments
Rather than having to keep track of invoices and payments manually, the software can do it all for you. It can free up a lot of your time so that you can focus on more aspects of your business. Another benefit is avoiding late payments. If you manually track payments, there are chances of missing a payment. It can damage your business’s reputation and make it difficult to stay afloat financially. With time and billing tracking software, you can set up reminders for when payments are due so that you never miss a payment again.
Captures Data
When you track your time and billing data, you create a historical record of your work. It can be beneficial for a variety of purposes, such as:
Identifying trends in your work patterns Analyzing your work process to find inefficiencies Reconstructing your work history for billing or other purposes
Reduce operational costs
A time and billing tracking software can help you reduce operational costs by automating your services’ tracking and billing process. It lets you save time and money by reducing the need for manual data entry and invoicing.
Better team productivity
Tracking the time your employees spend working on various tasks allows you to better understand where your team’s time is going. This information can be used to adjust your team’s workflow, ensuring they are as productive as possible.
Must-have Features in a Time and Billing Software
When choosing time and billing software, there are a few key features you should look for to ensure the software is a good fit for your business. A time and billing software should ideally have the following features:
Task assignment
A time and billing software must have a task assignment feature where you can allot tasks to your team members and give them access to monitor progress. The software must also allow you to see tasks assigned to each individual and track the progress of each task.
Time tracking — billable and non-billable hours
Any business providing hourly services needs time and billing software to track the number of billable and non-billable hours. It allows us to accurately invoice clients for the services rendered and helps businesses identify areas where employees are spending time.
Billing reports
Billing reports are essential, enabling you to track income and expenses. Without this feature, businesses would have to manually generate reports, which is time-consuming and prone to error. The billing report feature helps generate reports for a specific period and includes all relevant information, such as the date, time, invoiced amount, and payment status.
Invoice generation
Having software that can generate invoices automatically will save you time and hassle. This feature makes it easier to ensure that you are billing your clients correctly.
Accessibility through mobile
Time and billing software should have mobile accessibility to make it easy for busy professionals to track their time and billable hours. It can be a lifesaver for people who often work outside the office and don’t always have access to a computer.
Affordable pricing
Good time and billing software are one with an affordable pricing structure and a bunch of relevant features. The pricing must be transparent and flexible, with no hidden fees or long-term contracts. A free trial should be offered to help potential customers to try it before purchasing always does the trick!
A good customer support
The quality of the customer support reflects how dedicated they’re to hearing their customers’ concerns. Before you make a purchase, check about their customer support and read reviews to check if they walk the talk! Here is the list of the best Time and Billing Software:-
Clockify
Looking for an all-in-one billing and tracking tool? Your hunt ends here! Clockify is a best-in-class time and billing software that lets you easily track billable hours and makes it seamless to calculate billing hours while excluding non-billable hours. Every feature of Clockify is designed to simplify your billing process. You can streamline the workload by setting up projects, tracking, and creating invoices. Whether you’re a small business owner, a startup, or an enterprise, this tool is guaranteed to acknowledge your requirements. Not only this but you get informed about valuable insights on clients’ profitability. The best part? Clockify is entirely free for anyone to use.
Zoho Invoice
Zoho Invoice is one of the best time and billing tools to help you oversee the time investment done by each individual or the entire team. This tool can drastically optimize your billing and tracking process. Zoho Invoice has emerged as a go-to invoice and timesheet billing tool. Using this software, you can assign tasks to your team, manage projects and boost your team’s productivity. You can create a structured workflow with the help of Zoho’s advanced reporting feature. Mainly used by small businesses, Zoho, the best billing software, is free.
Canopy
Canopy is a great billing software for service-based industries. This fantastic tool is for businesses that don’t like wasting time on workflows and lack a central system to manage their time on a project. With Getcanopy, it’s easy to check the time spent by everyone on each project. Moreover, you get a bird’s eye view of your team’s progress and can ensure that everyone is doing their part with this tool. Another great feature of Getcanopy is its ready-to-use customized reports and billing templates. Getcanopy has many paid plans and add-ons based on some advanced features, along with a free plan.
Scoro
Scoro is built keeping the needs of a business to effectively manage time and streamline invoices. It’s easy to use and understand for everyone on the team. It also provides you with automatic generation time tracking reports for everyone in the team, weekly and monthly statistics for your billing needs, and a good overview of which projects are consuming most of your resources.
Myhours
With affordable plans, an intuitive interface, and impressive features, Myhours has become a well-known payroll management tracking tool. Myhours allows you to track your team’s activities without spending hours on multiple tools. With this tool, you can manage your entire team from one place and get a clear view of their overall activity. This billing and tracking tool lets you create reports of all the projects you’ve been working on for individual clients. You can also get a sneak peek into your team members’ availability allowing you to stay informed on whom to head over to when looking to outsource. With this tool, you can boost accountability by sharing automated reports with your clients and nurturing relationships with them.
Bill4time
Bill4time is crafted to help you with complete visibility into the entire operation of your workflow. With a clean user interface, it’s effortless for businesses to utilize their dashboard and get advanced analytics. Bill4time allows you to access all data with just one click and eliminates the need for tools and spreadsheets. It equips you with real-time insights and advanced KPIs to keep up with your company’s performance. This tool is built with agencies in mind. Customize and set recurring invoices, record expenditures, and organize them with this software. Bill4time offers three paid plans: Time & Billing, Legal Pro, and Legal Enterprise.
Toggl
Toggl is cost-effective time-tracking and billing software. It’s built for catering to businesses looking to tackle recurring processes, monitor time invested in each activity, and create an organized structure of your work. This software reduces your time spent on the mundane activity of tracking time and billing, provides your team members with a seamless workflow to log time and billing, and enables you to work in an environment that is intuitive and easy to use. With Toggl, you can save time from re-entering timesheets, and billing, reduce audit time, and improve efficiency. They have a free plan, a starter plan, a premium plan, and a customizable plan.
Nutcache
Nutcache is a multi-feature solution that helps companies with project budgeting, expense management, and timesheet management on the go. This well-designed software can easily configure your time tracking, invoicing, and account billing, see the actual time spent on your client’s project and generate accurate invoices. Additionally, you can send reminders for overdue invoices and payment delay data and accept payments with this tool. In addition to time tracking and billing features, Nutcache also comes with many automation features and project tracking tools. Depending upon your requirements and business size, you can select one from their free, pro, and enterprise plans.
Beebole
Beebole is known for its robust project time tracking tool aimed to help businesses of all sizes optimize their productivity. Set up the projects on Beebole and start filling your billable hours anytime, from anywhere. You can even work now and fill in the timesheets later using their stored reports. Team members can view and update their time logs and team assignment.
Replicon
Replicon is focused on taking the stress out of timesheet billing. It gets you the entire sum of your billable hours at your fingertips and allows you to track project progress, budget, and profitability in one place. Saving you from unnecessary headaches and time, Replicon is an affordable, efficient and scalable solution that offers you everything you need from a time tracking and billing tool. From project estimates to expenditure tracking to detailed reports that are shareable and a client portal, too, Replicon has lived up to expectations. They have three paid plans, from a project management tool to a professional service automation suite.
Timebillingapp
The Timebilling app can improve your work quality by creating an organized workspace. Your team can track time and billing while pinging users to enter time worked in real time. Featuring intuitive dashboards, Timebilling hands you role-based access to the team members. It also lets everyone access and tracks their progress at any time, from anywhere in the world. Time logs and invoices are automatically generated, which means no more time is spent on billing. All time logs are stored in your private cloud, so there’s no export or backup nightmare.
Conclusion
Though the market has a surfeit of time and billing software, only a few are deemed fit for your business. Time-tracking software can be used for a wide variety of purposes. You can track tasks, and billable hours, monitor employee productivity, and create payroll with the best time and billing software. In addition, you’ll receive reports about how your team spends its time, so you can optimize efficiency. From the above well-researched listicle of 11 tools, you’re free to choose the one that seems the perfect fit for your business. While doing so, don’t forget to check if they walk the talk! You may also explore some best accounting software for small to big businesses.
