If you use a fitness tracker during the day, you’ve likely enjoyed a visual dashboard that clearly displays your physical activity, including details like how many stairs you’ve climbed and how many hours you’ve spent standing. This data gives you clarity and insight into how you’re tracking against goals and targets you’ve set for yourself and helps you feel accomplished and validated for your efforts. In the same vein, accounting and consulting firm leaders want to collect complete and accurate data to gain a better understanding of how their employees are spending their time, helping them identify patterns and gain deeper insights into the firm’s financial performance, delivery quality, and employee well-being. Automated time management software makes this all possible.
Minimize Data Capture Pain
Historically, data collection has been a painful process, and time tracking is no exception. Imagine if you had to manually enter every step or workout minute into your fitness tracker: Inevitably, you’d miss entries, under- or overestimate duration, or mis-key a walking session as a jogging session. Most importantly, you wouldn’t enjoy doing it!
Similarly, professionals also dislike manually entering their time. It’s one more chore on top of keeping up with all-important client demands. Many professionals keep imprecise time tracking data during the week, and then scratch their heads every Friday afternoon as they try to piece all their time together to complete their timesheets. Some may even mis-enter hours for client A to client B or forget about an email sent while traveling or a call taken on the weekend.
Stop Sacrificing on Time Data
Because the process is so painful, firms have historically sacrificed the quality of time tracking data — giving short shrift to data accuracy as well as to associated metrics like engagement phase, underlying activities or procedures, and technologies leveraged. Firms typically rely on professionals’ guesstimating using a spreadsheet or a web-form akin to a spreadsheet, that simply lists clients and hours. This over-simplified version of a time tracking system doesn’t allow for narrative or commentary and often fall short when it comes to assessing the value of each engagement. This is where automated time management software can be a game-changer.
Automate Your Firm’s Time Tracking
Like the best fitness trackers, Intapp Time automatically captures your users’ work effort — without them bearing the burden of manually entering it or remembering how they spent their days. They can choose which digital activities they want Intapp Time to automatically capture — whether that’s writing a memo, talking on the phone, responding to an email, or editing a spreadsheet. They can also opt out of time tracking for certain activities, if that’s their preference.
At the end of the work period, your firm’s professionals can access their dashboards to review the timesheets created for them, adjust as needed, and submit when ready. Just like a digital fitness trainer, Intapp Time helps users view and understand how to improve performance.