Typically, the implementation of a time and attendance system falls to a company’s human resources department. However, it is absolutely critical that top executives become involved, too, lest they miss the chance to facilitate greater profitability throughout the entire company. 

The time data that is collected, if collected appropriately, can also be used to automate project management, project accounting, project tracking and project estimation improvement, as well as for internal, external and reverse billing automation.  

There is a shift happening in our world today from capital businesses to people businesses. This is a shift of valuing time as much as money.  About 50 years ago, when most people labored in a factory, workers were not considered volunteers, they were not empowered, and managing the money of the company (i.e. the capital) was much more important than maximizing the time and knowledge of the worker. Such businesses are called capital businesses because power and wealth flowed from the capital. 

Today, capital businesses are on the wane and developed world’s economy is moving towards people businesses. Simple manufacturing has moved overseas, primarily to China and India. Software, entertainment, consulting, design and architecture exemplify people businesses, but increasingly, even traditional manufacturing businesses, like Toyota and Ford, win through design and intellect rather than through excellence in manual labor on the shop floor. 

People businesses, like software companies and architecture firms, don’t track employee time to minimize break times. If they do it all (and they should), it is to understand costs and automate billing, and to a lesser extent, to track salary, paid time off, or to pay hourly knowledge workers correctly.  

If an executive team running a company is really a team – an integrated, diverse, synergistic group of people with shared vision and goals - then the system that he implements must serve the whole company, not just automate payroll or benefits management.  

Time management systems that historically have automated payroll are an outdated concept for people businesses. Time tracking is now a core business process. It should automate payroll, billing and project management. 

In many cases, automating billing or project management provides a much higher ROI to the organization and this can make the case that automation is both necessary and economically feasible. Many large organizations, particularly those that sell services to the U.S. government, have employees filling out more than one timesheet: one for project management, one for customer billing, one for payroll, and sometimes another for vacation/leave tracking. This is unnecessary and damaging to morale. The right time management system can replace multiple systems. 

An expertly developed and finely-tuned time management system can become a window into the real-time costs of any organization, especially if it provides:

• Access and a thorough understanding of costs at every level of the business — at a team level, a task level, a project level, a business unit level and a company level.
• Complete visibility into these costs for everyone in the organization who can impact them.
• Power to redeploy and shift time resource investments to optimize processes, reduce risk, thwart competition, drive revenue, and increase profits. 

The benefits of such a system make the relationship of time and money crystal clear.   

To understand time tracking as a core business process, first consider that time data feeds three fundamental business functions: 

• Payroll
• Billing
• Project management 

The ideal time and attendance system is 100 percent Web-based, and offers the ability to automate time tracking for project management, billing, professional (i.e., salary) payroll, and increasingly, for hourly payroll. The Internet enables real-time communication and data sharing through automated timesheet systems that would have been prohibitively expensive beforehand. Being 100 percent Web-based also enables new delivery models such as SaaS (software as a service) that can speed implementation, lower security and data loss risks, and lower the initial costs of rollout.

But even with the acceleration of rollout that can inure to the SaaS solution, there is no Easter bunny.  

I recently saw a statement on one vendor’s site that they can “implement in 2-3 days."

Most organizations will find this very unlikely to be accurate. If you think your requirements are that simple, then you’re probably not looking very hard. If it’s really that easy, then you should just keep emailing around those Excel spreadsheets that you’re already sick of.

This technology is powerful and it can help your company become more profitable in a number of ways. It can lower your payroll processing cost while increasing accuracy. It can speed up your billing and convert more A/R to cash. It can automate travel expense reimbursement. And most importantly, it can tell you which projects are broken before you would ever have known it before.

Vendors who claim two-day rollout times are just not being honest. They’re preying on your "cool Internet toy I found" excitement in order to sell you shelfware. If you think it’s easy, then you won’t look too hard at their solution, you’ll just buy it.

Which is exactly what they want. 

Billing automation can increase your company’s revenue by two to five percent, that project tracking automation can lower costs by six percent or more, and payroll automation can lower costs by one percent. By only automating payroll time tracking, companies miss out on most of those benefits. By taking advantage of those benefits, companies can increase profitability, sometimes by extraordinary amounts. 

About the Author:
Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx. Since 1996, Journyx has remained committed to helping customers intelligently invest their time and resources to achieve per-person, per-project profitability. Curt earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech in 1987.  As a software programmer fixing bugs for IBM in the early ‘90’s, Curt found that tracking the time it took to fix each bug revealed the per-bug profitability. Curt knew that this concept of using time-tracking data to determine project profitability was a winning idea and something that companies were not doing – yet… Curt created the world's first web-based timesheet application and the foundation for the current Journyx product offerings in 1997. Curt is an avid speaker and writer. Learn more about Curt.   

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