Accounting for time in your business is a big industry. Plenty is written about time, you know, time is money and take care of your minutes and the hours will take care of themselves. Time and material businesses make a living tracking time and authors have a plethora of advice on time management. So, with all that we know and the necessity for tracking that information, how likely is it that we can recall, without automation, something that happened a week, a month even 93 days ago? Why do I ask? I just finished the most chilling of stories from National Public Radio’s podcast “Serial” and it forced me to ask the question “How carefully am I tracking my time?
For those of you who have read my blogs, I’m always writing shout outs for TSheets Time Tracking Software, I have a smart phone, a Google calendar, I have dated entries in my business journals and I’m pretty aware of future activities. Aside from TSheets, which tracks my whereabouts through GPS, how can I verify where I am and what I am doing? I learned that an employee who used TSheets was actually identified as a suspect in a crime and was able to use the GPS log from TSheet’s secured timesheet system.to verify his location. Pretty awesome for him, but what if you aren’t on the clock? How do you remember where you were, who you were with and what you were doing on personal time?
Time tracking on a personal level is beyond my scope, but as I listened to Sarah Koenig’s investigation of Adnan Syed and whether or not his account of a specific timeframe matched up with cellphone data, friend’s recall of the same timeframe and forensic evidence, I found myself wondering about my time and how it is spent. It was a curious phenomenon to learn that it is easier to recount events of the day if there was something momentous that happened: a death, an accident, a catastrophe or a special event. Without that placeholder of time, it is merely another day of details.
Recently, I was investigating systems of time tracking for one of my clients. They have been using manual systems and needed to automate data entry. The software that they were looking for needed to track a budget of hours per job, send alerts for when employees were over budget and offer customizable reports by job and by cost code. We investigated TSheets, Big Time Software and a few others. TSheets was the only company in line with their budget but they decided to wait until they instituted a larger system that would accommodate all of their needs. But I wonder how much information will slip through the cracks by not having an automated system? How much time does it take to type in X number of employee’s timesheets and check the calculations? How much control is there to enter time directly into the accounting software without an approval first? I ask you, my readers, how will they know what they were doing 93 days ago?
