4 Surprising Benefits of Time Card Analytics

Two of the most important things for any business are assets and customers. “Assets” are the valuable resources leveraged by businesses to deliver their products and services, and “Customers” are the buyers who pay for what they deliver. The success of your business is closely tied to the performance of these two pillars. Amongst all the assets, and especially within the IT business, skilled individuals are the most valuable resource of an organization. They also contribute the most towards your organizational expenses as well as its success. Gartner estimates that ~40% of IT budgets are spent on salaries & benefits. Therefore it is critical to manage people and their time well to ensure that they are working on the most important priorities of the organization. Most organizations are familiar with this requirement now and are already practicing this judiciously, either manually or using a tool. However, the best benefits of time tracking automation are not yet leveraged to it’s full potential. Beyond simple time & attendance tracking, timecard analytics has the potential to create much more value for the business.

Following are 4 unexplored ways in which Timecard automation and analytics can pay off to your business:

1. Avoid Labour Standard Act Violation & Penalty An automated time & attendance system is essential for timekeeping requirements to ensure accuracy and avoid human error. However analytics of time card data offers an additional help by keeping a tab on compliance as well as over time against the minimum and maximum number of hours to be worked, at an individual or project level. This helps the organization to avoid any violations and penalties against the labour standard laws levied by the local or federal government. For example, Universities are required to report negative confirmations on time card submissions to the Federal government. The figure below shows a sample weekly labor compliance report for the all the individuals in a project.

2. Time Card Analytics for Project Capitalization Integrating time card data with the labour rates helps to analyze the cost of each activity or task of a project. This is an important data for project capitalization, when an organization decides to show a project on the balance sheet as an asset, which then gets depreciated over the expected life of the asset. Capitalization helps accountants to boost GAAP income for the organization by not considering the project cost as an immediate expense for the current year. Individuals who are out of compliance for time card are thus leaving money on the table – at least as far as financial reporting is concerned. 3. Optimize Productivity & Cost Analyzing time records using advanced analytics assists I.T business leaders to carry out time-motion study. These are used to establish employee productivity standard & improve efficiency by analyzing the daily activities of any group of employees over time, across location, projects, type of activities or other such dimensions. The visibility obtained from task analysis also enables cost optimization. For example, time card analytics can reveal information on a legacy applications that do not cost high in terms of license fees however the maintenance & support cost paid to service desk and support employees to fix recurring issues has been significant. The clarity obtained thus can help the Leaders to decide on whether to continue with the legacy application or to move to cloud based modern applications, which require less support costs. 4. Forecast with Precision Historical time records for any particular project against activity or project phase makes it easier to forecast the effort and duration for similar upcoming projects. In a similar way, task duration trend analysis for Incident, Problem, Change, Request or any other repetitive task carried out by any functional team, provides beneficial insights for plan and forecast the staffing requirement, budget and duration for a project or even a functional group. [Photo credit: Pixabay.]