Staffing agencies with a large contingent workforce can often struggle with tracking worker’s hours. However, this task remains especially important for generating the revenue necessary for successful business operations. As such, time-tracking data need to be accurate and seamlessly integrated into the agency’s payroll and/or accounting platforms.

Having employees enter in their own time offers an easy solution for documenting hours worked. At the same time, your agency needs to take meaningful steps to ensure accuracy and prevent timesheet fraud. With that goal in mind, let’s examine a few best practices for self-time entry. Leverage these insights to boost the efficiency and accuracy of this process, while also eliminating fraud.

What Best Practices Are There to Maximize Efficiency for Self-Time Entry?

Automating the Time Tracking Process

Your agency enjoys a large boost in efficiency by simply automating its time-tracking process. Accomplish this goal with a solution including a biometric time clock and a mobile app on workers’ smartphones. A time clock with biometric functionality requires either a fingerprint or facial recognition and prevents buddy punching by ensuring only a specific person can check in at a client.

Combining this solution with a mobile app, which has GPS-powered geofencing can accurately track the time worked for each employee. Your employees don’t have to manually check-in or fill out a timesheet. You and your client’s managers avoid falsified timesheets and are more grateful for a more efficient time-tracking process. Timerack offers a full range of solutions including the mobile app and biometric time clock mentioned above.

Avoid Too Granular Time Tracking

Tracking time at a too-detailed level siphons the efficiency of this process. For example, avoid requiring bathroom breaks or a quick 15-minute  breather to be noted on a timesheet. Sticking to the daily hours worked while accounting for lunch serves the needs of most businesses. With Timerack’s automated lunch policy, it eliminates the need for employees to punch in and out for lunch as it auto deducts a set amount of time from their daily total hours. While an automated approach allows for this extra detail, analyze whether these additional data points are important.

Aggregate Time Worked Based on Projects and Activities

Recording time worked based on various projects and related activities adds a measure of complexity to the timesheet process. Notably, leveraging an automated system mitigates this additional work for your employees. However, this approach pays dividends when it comes to analyzing the retrospectives related to previous project work. Understanding the time involved in a task makes project planning more efficient and successful.

It’s important to categorize this time upfront as opposed to after the fact. The latter approach requires a significant amount of extra work. Leverage automation to make the former categorization process easier on your employees.

Regularly Audit All Self-Time Entries

Having a regular auditing process remains essential in ensuring the accuracy of all timesheet data. Of course, this effort needs to happen before any bills are sent to the client. In addition to vetting the hours worked, ensure all time is assigned to the right project or activity. This data-cleaning activity builds a measure of trust between your agency and its clients.

Make Employee Self-Time Entry as Easy as Possible

When employees are entering their own timesheets, this process needs to be both simple and intuitive. While manually filling out a paper timesheet remains easy for your employees, an automated approach provides critical efficiency benefits. As noted earlier, utilizing a GPS-enabled mobile app with geofencing effectively automates this process for your staff. Using an intuitive, biometric time clock also provides a similar level of benefits.

Accurate Data is Better than Bad Data

An important golden rule with timesheet entry states that accurate data is better than bad data. Keep this in mind when considering processes to simplify the self-time entry for your employees. Forcing staff to track their time in extreme detail or requiring extra data fields increases the complexity. Your data accuracy and process efficiency suffer as a result.

Instead, leverage automation to make timesheet entry an intuitive process, seamlessly managed with little hassle. Instead of manually entering paper timesheets, your employees simply perform their duties, trusting their time is automatically recorded. It offers a meaningful opportunity to reduce wasteful processes, prevent timesheet fraud, and improve data accuracy.

The Right Technology Solution for Efficient Self-Time Tracking

As experts in providing state-of-the-art time tracking solutions for our staffing agency clients, Timerack fully understands efficient self-time entry. Our modern Timerack Mobile App for the iOS and Android platforms lets employees handle timesheet entry with ease. Its support for GPS provides geofencing capabilities that essentially eliminate timesheet fraud and buddy punching. The app functions seamlessly, letting your staff focus on their assignments.

Timerack also offers a variety of time clock solutions meeting the needs of your staffing agency and its clients. With everything from a biometric time clock to a tablet-based mobile kiosk, expect efficient employee time entry. Once again, the timesheet data seamlessly integrates with your agency’s payroll and/or accounting software.

Want to Improve Your Company’s Time-Tracking?

Improving the efficiency of your agency’s time-tracking process becomes easier when connecting with the team at Timerack. We provide clients with modern hardware in tandem with industry-best time-tracking applications for desktop and mobile. Contact our team to schedule a demo as soon as possible!