Ever wondered what your employees are up to but don’t want to intrude and become a micromanager? Hmmm, you could buy a crystal ball if you’re into that sort of thing. If not? You’d be better off using time management reporting.
This is the practice of tracking and presenting time spent at work, which helps managers spot inefficiencies, distribute workloads evenly, set realistic goals, improve transparency, and much more.
Great time management reporting can benefit any business, from improved team performance and resource allocation to increased revenue. Here’s everything you need to know.
TL;DR — Key Takeaways
- Time tracking reports focus (or they should, at least) on team efficiency rather than individual productivity. They typically include milestones, deadlines, deliverables, and other project or client data.
- Time management reporting helps you increase revenue, improve productivity, comply with the law, make better estimates, allocate resources more efficiently, and build trust with your clients.
- You can use Toggl Track to build fully custom, detailed time management reports with a wealth of data points, from the level of your entire business down to individual tasks.
- Once you have time tracking data, you can use it to remove operational bottlenecks, improve team performance, showcase value to your clients, and improve team communication.
What’s included in a time tracking report?
Time tracking reports are powerful tools for gaining insight into how people execute their work. Individuals may use them to enhance personal productivity, but teams and businesses need a broader perspective focusing on overall project efficiency rather than just personal output.
A detailed team time tracking report will include:
- Project milestones and deadlines to track progress and identify risks early
- Task completion times to understand how individual tasks influence specific workflows
- Billable vs. non-billable hours to ensure accurate client billing and maximize profitability
- Resource allocation data to see how work is distributed across a team
- Budget tracking to compare estimated vs. actual time spent to stay within financial constraints
Why time tracking reporting is so important
There are countless benefits to time tracking, depending on the use case and industry. For example:
- A hospitality company easily increased its revenue by 10% just by tracking employee time
- A digital consultancy achieved a 97% revenue forecast accuracy
- A PR firm increased its profitability by 20%
- A small communications agency increased in team size by 60% thanks to a better way to allocate resources
But what about your company? Here’s what you can expect when you commit to accurate time tracking reporting. 👇
Avoid lost revenue
We’ve all used the expression “time is money,” but it’s spot on when you bill clients by the hour rather than per deliverable. Accurate time tracking makes for a clear-cut difference between billable and non-billable hours and helps you provide value for clients without punishing yourself with extra work.
For example, you can spot how many work hours go into specific activities or clients and how this affects invoicing. You may learn that you invest more time in Client A, who pays you $500 per completed project, than in Client B, who pays $2,000 for similar work.
Access to time logs and timesheets gives you a breakdown of clients, projects, team members, and how they spend their time. This lets you spot inefficiencies easily, whether you need to reallocate team members to high-priority tasks or have a conversation with a needy client taking up more hours than stated in their retainer.
Improve employee productivity
Some employees see time tracking as an invasion of their privacy, and if you’re using surveillance software that takes screenshots, records your screen, or measures your keystrokes, then they have a point.
The good news? Other tools like Toggl Track exist to support team productivity rather than point fingers using any creepy tactics. Once you explain to your team that time tracking tools are there to benefit everyone, you can streamline your operations, save time, automate tasks, and so much more.
For example, you can identify areas where employees struggle and lose time. Detailed time data makes it easier to spot low-value, low-priority tasks that clog up project management workflows and drain time and money.
With tools such as Toggl Track and its detailed reports, you can get valuable insights about your clients, processes, team productivity, and much more. Below, you can see what a more detailed report looks like.
Legal compliance
Time tracking isn’t just nice to have. For some companies, tracking time is a legal necessity. These are just some of the laws that touch upon time tracking:
- Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in the US: Requires employers to track employee work hours to ensure compliance with minimum wage and overtime pay laws.
- European Working Time Directive (WTD) in the EU: Limits the maximum workweek to 48 hours and mandates rest, breaks, and paid leave.
- California Labor Laws in the US: Requires strict tracking of meal and rest breaks.
- UK Working Time Regulations (WTR): Limits the maximum workweek to 48 hours unless employees opt out. Also mandates rest breaks and paid annual leave.
Keeping accurate time records is a small price to pay for the prevention of potentially big lawsuits.
Cost estimation for better budgeting
Tracking your time now helps you in the months and years to come. Once you’ve tracked time for a while, you’ll build up a picture of how long it takes to complete specific projects and hit important milestones.
With the right tool, you can analyze profitability, revenue, and labor costs — breaking them down by Members, User Groups, Projects, Clients, Tasks, or Tags for a more detailed view.
The result? You become better at pricing, forecasting, project planning, and improving your profitability. With good time tracking reports, you gain insights into projects, tasks, and people, which gives you invaluable data for future projects.
Resource allocation
Time tracking and management show you exactly what your team is up to in real-time. For example, one department could be drowning in work while another is at 20% capacity.
Tracking time also means tracking project progress so you can allocate budget and resources accordingly. You don’t have to wait until you miss a critical deadline to determine that something is halting you in your tracks.
Build trust through transparency
Time management software is a bridge of trust between you, your clients, and your employees.
With detailed timesheets, client billing is easier because they see what they’re being charged for, with an itemized list of tasks and deliverables. For employees, timesheets and time logs show the exact amount of time someone has worked on a task or project.
With tools such as Toggl Track, the task and project time tracking data is available to everyone, so employees can enjoy transparency without fear of micromanaging or surveillance (which we’re very against, by the way, and you should be, too).
How to create detailed time management reports with Toggl Track
Accurate time management starts with consistent, accurate tracking. Follow these six steps to learn how to create detailed reports in Toggl Track:
1. Track time accurately
To track time effectively, start by adding a timer for each task or project you’re working on. Toggl Track makes this process simple with our easy-to-use start/stop timer, so you can record time accurately in real time. If you forget to start the timer, you can manually add time entries.
Use the Toggl Track browser extension or mobile app to track time on the go, so there’s no risk of your time going unrecorded.
2. Create clear project and task categories
To make your time data actionable, organize your time entries by project and task categories.
Create projects for major initiatives and break them down into tasks. For example, if you’re working on a marketing campaign, you might have projects like “Content Creation” or “Social Media Management” with tasks such as “Write Blog Post” or “Schedule Posts.”
Consistently tag time entries with relevant projects, clients, or specific tasks to ensure well-organized reports.
3. Generate custom reports
Once you’ve tracked your time consistently, it’s time to generate custom reports that provide meaningful insights. Toggl Track allows you to filter and customize reports by team member, project, client, and more.
To do this, go to the Reports section, select the date range, and use the filter options to break down time by the category that matters most to your business.
- Time breakdown by team member: Understand who’s spending time on what by filtering by user.
- Time breakdown by project: See how much time is allocated to each project, helping you manage budgets and deadlines.
- Time breakdown by client: Track billable hours for each client you work with.
4. Review report regularly
Regularly reviewing your time management reports is crucial for identifying areas where you can improve efficiency. Set a recurring reminder to review your reports weekly or monthly to catch any issues early, such as any time you spend on low-priority tasks or team members needing support.
Use Toggl Track’s automated email reports to receive time summaries directly to your inbox, ensuring you stay on top of your time management efforts.
5. Use visual summaries
Visual reports like pie charts and bar graphs make it easier to understand time allocations at a glance.
Toggl Track offers these visual summaries, which can highlight time spent by project, task, or team member. This makes it easier to spot trends and adjust to optimize time usage.
Consider exporting your reports to CSV or PDF formats for deeper analysis or sharing with stakeholders.
6. Customize your reports
Customization is one of the standout features of Toggl Track, enabling you to tailor your time management reports to suit the specific needs of your business. Whether you need to track billable hours, project progress, or time spent on specific tasks, Toggl Track allows you to adjust settings and filters to generate the most relevant reports.
Toggl Track’s Enterprise plan offers personalized onboarding and training for businesses with more complex needs. You’ll receive customized solutions built by Toggl’s engineers to meet your team’s unique requirements, ensuring your reporting is as efficient and relevant as possible.
What to do with time tracker data once you have it
Once you have the time entries and associated data in one place, put the intel to good use and break it down into key focus areas. Here’s how to use that data to improve efficiency, win back your team’s time, and set an accurate project budget.
Identify and resolve bottlenecks
Look at your reports to find specific tasks, projects, or people holding you back. For example, you can combine your task management and time tracking apps (e.g. Asana) to determine which clients take up most of your team’s working time. Compare that with revenue to see if the client is getting more value than they’re paying for.
You can also look at timesheets to determine how much work each team member completes across clients in a day, week, or month and cross-reference with their time off. Without doing complex calculations or digging into Excel sheets, you’ll find your top performers.
Another way of looking at it is comparing how much time specific tasks take up in your overall workflows. For example, if the wireframing part of the design process takes up 40% of the workload, the work should be delegated, outsourced, or completed by extra staff.
Supercharge your team performance
One key feature of good time tracking software like Toggl Track is the ability to examine individual and group performance. The end goal is not to micromanage or conduct surveillance. Instead, you want to find out who is overworked and who could help them out.
For example, you can use Toggl Track to find out:
- Who works the most, and when
- Your most time-consuming tasks
- The ratio of billable to non-billable hours
- Time spent on tasks vs. budget for specific clients
- Estimated vs. actual task time
Having a strong reporting functionality in your time management app lets you help your team and optimize their workload instead of monitoring them.
Communicate with your team
A time tracking tool should never be used as part of a blame game. Instead, encourage your team members to use data as a tool for collaboration. For example, if you spot that someone is struggling, give them an extra set of hands or postpone their deadlines to support them.
This is the only way to get long-term buy-in from your team members. The data should reinforce trust and transparency and not pit your team members against one another.
Show your clients value
Imagine you run a marketing agency and create assets for a client in the insurance industry. You create a landing page for them, and through some analytics work, you show the client that the page (copy, design, and research) took 10 hours to create and now nets the client $5,000 per month. If they paid $5,000 for the work, this means that after the first month, they’re making a clean profit and a fantastic return on investment.
Time management reporting can prove the value of your work to your clients so they can connect the work with the value they get. They can justify their investment (not costs), and you can, in turn, build long-lasting partnerships.
Boost team performance and profitability
Time management reporting benefits everyone in and outside of your business. You’ll see improved performance, employee satisfaction, and profitability.
Remember that better time management is about creating smarter ways to work, improving team dynamics, enhancing client relationships, and ultimately, growing your revenue.
If that sounds like something your business could benefit from, book a demo with Toggl Track to see how we can transform your business with smart time management reporting.
Mile is a B2B content marketer specializing in HR, martech and data analytics. Ask him about thoughts on reducing hiring bias, the role of AI in modern recruitment, or how to immediately spot red flags in a job ad.
