Why is it important to track your hours?

Why is it important to track your hours?

Tracking your hours (billable and non-billable) is very important for many reasons…

1. The most important reason for keeping an accurate account of your time is for billing your clients. If you bill clients based on an hourly rate, it is essential to keep track of your hours as you perform the work. Filling out a time sheet at the end of the week will not be nearly as accurate as if you entered the time on the spot.

2. If you do not bill clients on an hourly basis, but instead bid a project at a flat rate, it is much easier to get an accurate estimate if you are able to research the time you spent on similar projects in the past.

3. Tracking your hours will also give you a real-time account for how your time is being spent throughout the day. After a month of tracking your time, you may find that only five hours of your day are actually spent working on projects for clients, and the other three hours are spent answering phone calls, responding to emails, or other miscellaneous office work. Having the data available to you for analysis can be very beneficial in planning out your daily schedule.

How detailed should I be in tracking my time?

The level of accuracy in tracking your time depends on your particular business. It can become unreasonable to track everything down to the minute, as likewise, rounding everything to the hour (or half-hour) can be very inaccurate. TrackMyHours.com will let you enter your start and end time accurate to the minute, and will calculate total time spent by rounding your time to the nearest 1/10^th of an hour (6 minutes) or to even 1/100^th of an hour.

TrackMyHours.com will give you the tools you need to accurately track, and analyze your hours. Sign up today for the 30-day free trial!