You’ve probably heard the saying: “Time is money.” It refers to the value of time (which is finite) as a commodity. If you’re not making the most of your time to earn money, you’re essentially losing money.

Whether you’re a business owner, entrepreneur or professional, time is your most important asset – and knowing where you spend it on is crucial. Otherwise, you waste your time on activities that are less productive or profitable.

That’s where the need for time-tracking software comes in. Simply put, it lets you monitor how you and your remote virtual assistant team spend your time, and this comes with benefits for your business. Here are some of the major ones you should know.

Time tracking simplifies billing

Any amount of time you spend performing your core business for your customers should be billable. But you’ll likely have a couple of concerns when filling out your invoice:

1. Relying solely on memory is out of the question. You’d likely forget the little things, and they add up.
   
   
2. Manually recording each block of your time and indicating its corresponding activity is time-consuming and tedious.

With a time tracker, you – or each member of your virtual assistant team – can record tasks as they’re carried out, then generate a report or invoice (depending on the software you use) to bill the client. This allows you to save time on administrative tasks and ensure that you bill every activity.

It lets you better utilise your team

If your remote team tracks all activities, your organisation will eventually gather enough information that would let you:

1. Monitor how much time is given to each client.
2. See how each member of your team spends their time.
3. Plan your team’s tasks and adjust them when necessary.

For example, let’s say you add each client as a project in your software. As everyone on your team tracks their time on each, they also create different categories based on the various tasks they do for every client.

If you budget a certain amount of hours for a project but notice that your team has nearly used up all the time you allocated, you can address the issue right away by:

• Budgeting more hours (and informing the client, of course), or;
• Instructing the team to focus only on urgent tasks for that client.

Likewise, if your remote team is finishing a project earlier than expected, you can plan ahead and ask the client for additional work, or reduce the amount of non-billable work.

You can standardise tasks

As your remote assistants’ team gets used to tracking time and categorising different responsibilities, you’ll be able to eventually create benchmarks on how long it takes to complete different types of tasks. This will enable you to create precise estimates on how long endeavours take.

For instance, because you know how much time your offshore virtual assistant services team spends on research and production, you’ll be able to provide existing clients and stakeholders with accurate quotes for future projects.

At the same time, because you know when your offshore assistant team can complete projects, you can take on other clients, maximising your company’s ability to earn.

It helps you design better processes

Another benefit to knowing how offshore virtual assistant services employees spend their time: you find out the actual financial costs of specific business processes. This data can help you make improvements to your organisation’s procedures and make your teams more efficient.

Performance reviews become more accurate

One of the major problems with performance reviews is that managers need to evaluate an employee’s performance for an entire year. Clearly, leaders can’t do this on memory alone; they need to look at tangible data.

But if you’ve been tracking your remote it staffing employees’ time and activities, you can conduct performance reviews impartially and rely completely on what the numbers show. This would allow you to:

1. Determine who deserves recognition and/or better compensation.
2. Coach underperformers to help them improve.

To ensure overtime is recorded

There are non-exempt and exempt employees; the former are entitled to overtime pay, while the latter isn’t. If your companies that hire virtual assistants team has non-exempt employees, you’ll definitely need to monitor their time with time-tracking software to make sure that their salary is properly distributed.

Not giving overtime pay to non-exempt employees puts you at risk of lawsuits, which can be used to recover unpaid wages – and you don’t want that.

It lets you scale up your business

Growth is inevitable when your business is running like a well-oiled machine. By carefully keeping track of your employees’ time, you’ll be capable of expanding your revenue proportionately.

Time-tracking software, for instance, can make your remote team more efficient and significantly cut down on invoicing and budgeting. With the time you save and profits you maximise, you can ramp up your output by hiring more remote employees. And because tasks are benchmarked, you’ll know how many more people you need to scale up your business.