Yesterday, I had a very interesting discussion with a friend of mine about project time tracking. Being a project manager in a small company, he’s been looking forward to find some project time tracking tool that could help him get more accurate data on time, as the way of time tracking they were used to often proved to be inaccurate and time consuming. So, my friend needed to find arguments to convince his executive in the efficiency of the efficiency of project time tracking software versus spreadsheets.
As a result of this talk, I decided to describe the difficulties a project manager faces when using the old-fashioned means of project time tracking, such as a kind of shared calendars to plan tasks and activities, and weekly Excel spreadsheets where actual time spent on those activities is marked.

1. Inaccuracy in the reported time. – Shared calendars are great to plan some activities, as a manager may add changes to the tasks or appoint tasks for the next week or even month. The problem is that when it comes to entering the time spent on tasks in Excel spreadsheets manually, the probability of making a mistake is very high. Moreover, hardly everyone may remember (or mark in a calendar) the exact time it took them to fulfill this or that task. When company’s clients are billed for time-and-material, it’s more than just inconveniency.
2. Consolidating all spreadsheets takes too much time. – Even in a small company of about 30 employees getting all the Excel timesheets together is a pain. It takes a significant amount of time. But to worsen the things, someone may suddenly need changes in his/her spreadsheet, as misspelled the numbers, or “completely-forgot-about-that-little-five-minute-task…” I say, it’s a nightmare.
3. Time-consuming reporting. – Then a project manager needs to make reports for accountants, for customers, for executives, etc. out of the information received, which is also rather time-consuming.

Project timesheet software eliminates the double work of entering and re-entering the data from calendars to spreadsheets. Entering the time spent on tasks daily provides more accurate data, and there’s a far less chance for making a mistake.

There’s no need to wait for the spreadsheets to come, as the data gets into a single system, and a project manager has the access to the information just as soon as it is entered.

Moreover, there’s no need to spend loads of time on making reports, as project timesheet software, commonly, provides the possibility of creating different kinds of reports automatically. The reports for accounting, billing, etc. are done faster, and much more accurately, thus providing more accurate and actual calculations.

P.S. The problem is that my friend’s executive is a kind of far away from being a geek, using his PC once a week to check e-mails. He’s absolutely satisfied with the way project time tracking is performed currently. Hope, however, as my friend’s going to provide him with detailed calculations of the savings the customers and the company can achieve, thanks to accurate billing, his eyes and his heart will open to the progress.