What Should a Time Tracking App Do?

What should a time tracking app do? It depends on what you do.

Let’s start with what’s most important: you get paid. A time app should record your hours if you aren’t salaried. If you are salaried, you don’t need to bother with a time app, right? Well, what happens when you go on leave—how do you record this? Even if you are salaried, you might be entitled to overtime—you wouldn’t want to miss out. And your employer shouldn’t want to risk getting on the wrong side of FLSA or state labor laws, so keeping track of your time should be important to them as well.

If your work is billed back to customers, a time app is the best way to make sure the invoices are fast and easy to produce, accurate and have all the details needed to explain what you were doing.

Tracking time in an app is especially valuable for particular industries. For example, if you’re working for a government agency, you really do need to use a specially configured time app. That’s because federal contractors have specific time-keeping rules. An automated tool helps ensure you comply.

Nonprofits are another category of organizations that greatly benefits from a time app. Many use fund or grant accounting. Distributing time across funding sources is essential to showing donors that their contributions are well-spent. Without a tracking app, the process would be prone to error and time consuming. Being able to minimize administrative costs and breeze through audits can play a major role fund-raising success.

For “indirects” (don’t you hate that term?), internal project work is much easier to manage with time tracking. Administrative projects shouldn’t be invisible since time is spent on them, which is why it’s valuable to have a time tracking app to record these hours, too.

In today’s remote work environment, mobile entry is even more important than ever. Giving your employees a tool for tracking and logging their hours in an app on their phone means that they can access their time tracking tools from anywhere. Also, if your assignment is specific to a location, and your employer is the suspicious (realistic) type, you may find yourself getting geo-fenced by your time app. In short, your phone’s GPS makes sure that you are where you are supposed to be when you log in or out.

Of course, laws and work rules vary by job type, location, organizational unit, customer, project type and more. Your time app will need to accommodate all of this. And to make sure you can use it, it has to be in your language.

While no individual would require all this flexibility from their time app, even relatively small organizations can need a broad range of capabilities. So, what should a time tracking app do? The answer is: a whole lot! From compliance to geo-fencing, time tracking apps have come a long way and can provide essential functionality to solve problems for organizations large and small.

For more information on the DATABASICS Time & Expense solutions, contact us, or call (800) 599-0434.

DATABASICS is driven to meet the most demanding time and expense management challenges for organizations throughout the world with a combination of deep expertise, next-gen technology and a focus on the unique needs of each customer. Powered by decades of experience, DATABASICS is in the business of solving time and expense problems with solutions that are the right choice for today and easily adapt to the uncertainties of tomorrow. Time and expense are better together, which is why DATABASICS addresses these two critical business processes with absolute ease in one solution.

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