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Do you ever lose track of time when you're in deep work?
It's difficult to justify the time you worked on a project if you have no accurate indication of when and where you spent your time – especially if you're a remote worker with flexible hours.
If you're using Salesforce CRM for sales, marketing, customer service, or operations, you're probably faced with this issue each time payroll and billing cycles come to a close.
That's why you need online time tracking.
Sometimes it feels like the necessary evil of remote work, but in this article, we'll discuss how much time you can optimize by relying on a tool to track work hours for you and your team. You'll also learn how tracking work hours for specific tasks and projects will benefit your remote, hybrid, and office workers.
Let's jump in with a description of the types of time tracking, and then we'll list the benefits of time tracking on Salesforce and ten tools you can use. Finally, we'll show you how flair can automate your entire time tracking and attendance process from recruiting to payroll.
Time tracking is how businesses keep a record of employees' work hours to ensure they get paid the correct amount in each work cycle.
This is especially necessary for part-time, casual, and wage workers who receive hourly or weekly paychecks. Full-time employees need to track their overtime for compensation above their regular salary.
In some countries and regions, such as the EU, time tracking is mandatory. Employers must keep a record of hours worked to verify compliance with labor laws.
Managers must also keep tabs on sick leave, half days, and other absences that would affect employees' remuneration.
In short, time tracking is about fair pay and productivity.
Regarding HR software, time tracking is seen as a separate feature from absence management and vacation planning. This is because time tracker software enables you to set a timer for a specific activity or log time spent on a task, for instance, "sales call with client X."
This is different from booking a sick day off, which could be seen as more of a calendar-related feature.
In this sense, there are three types of time tracking:
Depending on your business, you'll use one or a combination of time-tracking methods for comprehensive reporting, faster billing, and fair payroll.
If you're mainly concerned with employee attendance, then time clocking will be sufficient.
You can use a paper-based system that gets digitized for processing, manual entries in spreadsheets, or rely on time-clocking software to do this automatically or semi-automatically.
If you need accurate project time tracking to track time spent on multiple projects per day, then time-recording software is your best option because the timer will run in the background while work is being done.
You can also look into smart timers that automatically pick up when an employee switches to a different task or leaves their desk.
The major downside of this time-tracking method is that it can create a sense of anxiety in employees who are aware that their every minute is being recorded.
The time-entry method gives employees more control and autonomy over their timesheets and allows them to structure their work day.
Time-entry software could be a more admin-intensive approach as it requires filling out timesheets. However, the significant benefit of time entry is that it's easier to pick up discrepancies because you can view the entire work day and work week at a glance and see the tally of work hours.
If the day column doesn't add up to eight hours, the employee immediately knows something needs to be logged or they still need to complete their work for the day.
Salesforce has outgrown its reputation as a cloud-based product for customer relationship management (CRM).
Yes, it still offers all the great CRM features that sales teams at major enterprises have come to trust, and it keeps adding more value for sales, marketing, customer service, operations, and other business processes.
One of the features that gives teams an extra boost of efficiency is time tracking, because it enables real-time reports on billable hours, team productivity, and project progress.
With increasing numbers of companies choosing hybrid or remote work over office-based work, it's crucial to set up smarter workflows for digital communications while maintaining complete visibility of employee work times.
If your company uses Salesforce to measure and manage service delivery and customer success, it will be easy to integrate a comprehensive time-tracking solution into your current workflows.
There are many benefits of Salesforce time tracking. These include:
There are dozens of dedicated time-tracking systems on the Salesforce AppExchange, the third-party application marketplace for Salesforce users.
We're listing a handful of them below to help you understand what time-tracking tools are out there in the Salesforce ecosystem and how they work.
Clockify is a time-tracker app that's Lightning ready and can be installed as a browser extension on Chrome or Firefox. Once you create an account, you can install the browser extension and open it in Salesforce.
It creates a Start Timer button for you and your entire team in Salesforce and allows you to track time across desktop and mobile. You can also log time manually and create timesheets and reports.
Mission Control is part of the collection of productivity software on Salesforce AppExchange. It boasts whiteboarding and collaboration features and the ability to log time and record progress.
This app provides multiple reporting options, including timesheets, leave days, and burndown charts.
Professional Services Automation (PSA) in project management describes the technology that automates repetitive business tasks to optimize turnaround time.
Precursive PSA was built for resource management and keeping track of employees' billable hours, leave, skills, and KPIs. It allows for capacity planning and customer collaboration.
You can set project milestones and use Precursive PSA to handle project finances and customer billing.
Response Time Tracker is a simple tool for tracking your sales team's response times on leads, contacts, and cases.
It automatically picks up how much time each sales team member takes to reach out to these critical potential customers and produces reports so you can easily see where to optimize your sales pipeline.
Inspire Planner is another PSA app for project management that provides tools for automated resource management, productivity reporting, and project progress.
Besides a stopwatch for time tracking and daily and weekly timesheets, Inspire Planner offers agile sprints and workflows, setting milestones, project risk assessment, and creating task reminders to keep your team on track.
Vaykay is a time-off and leave-request tracker that enables employees to request approvals for hourly and daily time off.
Managers can use Vaykay to easily keep track of employees' time off, company expenses, and various types of leave and holidays. It generates reports on these absences and expenses that can be used to calculate overtime, accruals, and other payouts.
Vaykay doesn't offer any features for tracking actual time worked, though.
Time And Expense (Professional) offers multiple ways to log time and expenses, such as via web, mobile, email, spreadsheets, and credit card transactions. You can add your company expense policies, and it allows multi-tax support.
It enables you to communicate project time and expenses with clients with the option to get approvals directly from them.
Aduno is a platform for project management, company expenses, and customer invoicing that enables you to log time and expenses on projects for client billing.
A transaction needs to take place to move a lead from opportunities to customer support. And that's where Aduno comes in. Aduno automatically generates quotes and invoices for new clients based on logged time and expenses.
TMetric is similar to Clockify. Once you've signed up for your account, you can add the browser extension and start tracking via your Salesforce account.
With TMetric, you don't need to measure time spent on tasks manually – a Start Timer button will appear on every task in Salesforce for you to click and start time recording. TMetric automatically stops the timer once you switch to another task, minimizing the effort needed to record your work hours accurately.
If necessary, you can edit time entries before exporting reports and invoices for clients.
ClickTime also offers a dedicated time tracker integrated with Salesforce, called a Connector. Clicktime can be used for automated project creation once certain pipeline criteria have been met.
It can then track total work hours spent on the project, billable hours, and project costs and push these back to Salesforce from the ClickTime app.
We've listed ten time-tracking tools that can be used with Salesforce, so why would you need anything else?
Because we know that a true time-tracking solution is not an isolated tool – it needs to track actual time on tasks across your business processes and work seamlessly with payroll, recruitment, and performance management.
flair is an HR platform that was built natively on Salesforce with the sole purpose of helping you reach your business goals while cultivating healthy company culture.
flair's advanced time-tracking features enable your team to track and record work wherever it gets done – whether on mobile or web – using a timer or logging their hours worked. This is synced across devices, so the moment you switch from one device to another, your timer doesn't skip a beat.
Location-based time tracking and physical time-tracking devices can be used to enrich timesheet data further.
Employees can start the timer from within their Employee Hub or via the flair mobile app and edit entries later if needed.
The manager approval process is baked in, and you can set up time tracking frameworks based on different timezones, legislations, and flexible work hours.
You can set up rules for the length and frequency of breaks to help ensure employees don't get overworked and burnt out, and flair will automatically calculate overtime.
Payroll is fully automated and integrated, with the option to do DATEV exports if necessary.
Time tracking is all about fair pay and productivity, and flair's got you covered.
You can choose to use time clocking, manual time entries, or project-based time tracking with flair.
To do time clocking, simply go to your Employee Hub at the beginning of your work day and click the Start Tracking button to start the timer. This will accurately log your work hours. Press the Pause button to take breaks, Play to end your break, and Stop to clock out at the end of a shift.
You can also create projects and let employees track time spent working on specific projects.
To start a new project as a manager, log into the flair HR app in Salesforce and go to the Attendance tab. Create a new Project and set your specific parameters, such as the allocated time and the start and end dates.
Once the project has been saved, you can navigate to the Time Tracking menu item. Then, click on the Projects tab to see all your projects.
You can open and edit your Projects and see the number of hours tracked on each item.
This makes it easy for managers to track how much time employees spend on projects and how much time is left to project completion. It also helps to manage the project budget and client expectations better.
Employees can always go back to their Time Tracking section in the Employee Hub to view, edit, and check the status of manager approvals.
In the Overview tab, they will see a summary of their working time in the current week and previous weeks, as well as planned hours for coming weeks. They can make corrections to their logged hours and add a note for their manager.
flair's time tracking tools are easy to set up and use. Our intuitive interface on desktop and mobile means a quick ramp-up time for managers and employees alike.
The best thing about time tracking on flair? You don't have to be a Salesforce customer to benefit from flair's features. Our platform can be used as a standalone product and is perfect for companies with two to 10,000+ employees.
Besides flair's convenient and accurate time-tracking features, you can also use our platform in different ways to manage your time at work better.
Let's check them out.
flair offers plenty of features to help you save time during the recruiting process.
It allows you to post one job ad on multiple job sites (over 2,500 available) and create a company careers page to automate the advertising and application process.
We also offer a resumé parsing tool that helps you extract valuable information from applicants' CVs and fill out your database fields.
You can create custom document templates and automatically assign applicant reviews to your teammates to democratize the recruiting process.
Once a candidate is hired, you can enroll them in an automated onboarding workflow to welcome them, prompt them to fill out their employee data, and sign the relevant documents. These features save a lot of time in hiring and onboarding new employees!
Another feature flair offers to improve your project management process is the Skills Matrix.
Managers can create new skills, assign them to employees, and request ratings on their skills. flair displays this dynamic skill set in a grid format to give you a bird's eye view of your team's strengths and areas of improvement.
How does this help with time management? You will save hours of inefficiency when you understand who the right people are for the job.
Using the Skills Matrix feature helps you assign relevant tasks to the most-skilled employees in each area of expertise to move your projects forward more efficiently.
flair's absence management features enable you to customize leave-logging categories and rules for multiple territories to comply with international labor laws.
Employees can easily request time off and access their team's availability in a sleek calendar view.
Not only does this help you see overlaps and plan team projects better, but it also allows other team members to make informed decisions for optimized time efficiency.
You get notified and can approve absence requests via desktop, mobile, and Slack, and we also offer integrations with other popular business apps such as Google Calendar and Calendly.
Monitoring time off is easy with our powerful reporting features that give you an overview of employee absences.
With flair, you can set up task workflows for employees to ensure everyone knows what needs to be done and when.
When a task is completed, it triggers the next step and ensures that work gets done with minimal interruptions. This is especially handy when onboarding new employees and garnering the relevant documentation for their employment.
You can create, edit, and duplicate onboarding workflows and assign them to specific departments, job roles, legislations, and more.
The Slack integration allows flair to automatically ping your team with reminders to complete their assigned tasks.
Moreover, our API and third-party app integrations enable you to cross-collaborate between apps.
We've already mentioned how flair helps you automate remuneration, overtime, and absence processing for payroll.
With our integrated payroll feature, you'll have all your ducks in a row when it's time for payouts. flair preprocesses payroll so you can see your amounts and make any adjustments if needed.
You can set up multiple legislations to ensure you pay each employee the correct amount, wherever they are in the world.
Payroll datasheets are collaborative and editable, and changes are highlighted so you can keep track of every cent.
Whether you're using an integrated, international payroll solution or simply need an Excel or DATEV export, flair will work for you.
Along with the time tracking and Skills Matrix features that flair offers, you can use our powerful, collaborative Shift Planner to schedule workers when and where they're most needed.
Employees will automatically be notified of upcoming shifts and can request shift swaps or other changes.
The shifts can be viewed in an easy, color-coded calendar format and filtered by multiple locations. You can also tag shifts with predefined labels, so employees know which areas to work in.
Shift Planner helps everyone in your team, especially wage workers, stay updated with their work hours and where to log their time.
We hope this article has helped you understand the benefits of time tracking at work and assists in finding the right tool for accurate time tracking at your company using Salesforce.
Whether your team members prefer to clock in and out every day or log the exact hours they worked and took breaks, there are multiple tools available for you to try.
Salesforce time tracking is helpful for several reasons, including making it easier to run accurate payroll, manage work-life balance, bill clients, and monitor your team's productivity.
Time-tracking reports can reveal a lot about your company culture!
If you opt for a dedicated project management or time tracking tool, make sure it can be used in conjunction with the other business processes at your company. This could be via Salesforce or other integrations with third-party apps.
flair offers advanced time tracking features and an entire toolset for running HR and payroll at your company using Salesforce.
To see how flair can help your company, book a demo.
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