Time tracking is an essential activity for any professional services organization. Since you sell your services by the hour, the hour has become your product. Just as you would track how many products were sold to a customer, you need to accurately track how many hours you spend working for each client.
The TiM Time tracking add-on for Dynamics 365 increases net revenue and saves time.
However, time tracking is also quite likely one of the activities most hated by consultants. It gets put off, it’s tedious, and the traditional way of tracking time – the timesheet – is designed contrary to the way we naturally view time. Thus, consultants often spend hours trying to determine how much of their time was spent on each client… and they often wind up guessing.
But what if that consultant guessed 7 hours of work for a client when he actually worked 8? Multiplied across many consultants and 52 weeks in a year, that can result in a significant loss of billable time – or in other words, a loss of revenue.
How do you address the problem? You can’t miraculously make your consultants enjoy tracking their time. However, changing the tedious nature of the task to make it easy to accomplish – even second nature – is a very powerful way to ensure that this necessary behavior becomes a firmly entrenched part of your company culture.
That’s why TiM (Time is Money) was created. It is designed from the ground up to be simple and easy to use. Moreover, it has many features that remind you to track your time in an unobtrusive way, and even leverages automation techniques to track your activity automatically, saving you hours of administrative time each month.
Get an overview of TiM in this time tracking for Dynamics 365 video.
A few years ago, studies were conducted to determine how people “see” time in a visual sense. Many people explained it as a series of moving boxes or circles – very reminiscent of the electronic calendars that we use today. Conversely, nobody said “I see it like Microsoft Excel (a grid.)”
TiM is well-received by employees and managers alike because it’s instantly familiar. It functions as an unobtrusive part of the application that nearly every professional uses: Microsoft Outlook. It helps you visualize your time in a manner that you’re already accustomed to – the Outlook calendar.
There are three ways to register an activity:
- : Click into the appropriate time box in the calendar, type a description and press enter, then confirm your category with another click, and you’re done!
- : Do you have an appointment on your calendar? Simply drag it over to the TiM Calendar, confirm your category, and you’re done!
- : For all those activities you forgot to put on your calendar, click on Uncategorized, check the box beside the time entries you want to report, and confirm the category… and you’re done!
After your time entries are recorded, you’ll want to translate the captured time into invoices so you can get paid.
TiM integrates with a broad range of accounting and ERP applications, including Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Business Central. Once you have confirmed the accuracy of your time boxes, you simply right-click on the event, select TiM > Post, and the box will turn green, signaling you that the information has been posted to Dynamics 365.
What are some of the benefits that TiM time tracking for Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides?
As a business owner or manager:
- Easy process increases user adoption.
- More time captured and billed.
- Streamlines the back-office workflow.
- Increased profit.
As an individual that must track time:
- Simple, easy process.
- More time captured, more accurate view of your performance.
- Helps to achieve goals.
- Work from anywhere – TiM is cloud-connected.
- Frees up time for more important, revenue-generating tasks.
Tracking time is essential to the profitability of any professional service organization. Making it easy and quick to accomplish is crucial to ensure that everyone will do their part. TiM helps overcome the barriers to tracking time by streamlining the process as much as possible, using a paradigm familiar to everyone.
Would you like to know how TiM could benefit your organization? How much billable time can you add to your bottom line? to find out.
By Handsfree |
