Time trackers enable employees to either passively or manually track time they spent on projects, tasks, and other work. In the simplest terms, it represents a digital variant of paper timesheets.

While many companies still rely on manual processes and spreadsheets to track time, these practices can be inaccurate and hard to scale. In addition to decreased revenue in billable hours, failure to accurately track time can lead to bad data, and reduce ability to make critical business decisions.

And, ironically, one of the biggest issues is that tracking your time takes time.

Time trackers automate the process, reduce human errors associated with monitoring labor and absences, and track productivity.

How to Compare Time Trackers

Inaccurate time tracking leads to unnecessary overtime, bad planning, inaccurate estimates, exceeded budgets, incorrect payroll, or canceled projects. With a right time tracker, you can ensure your company has reliable, accurate data, which can help identify and eliminate problems early. Additionally, your employees won’t spend more time tracking hours and work than getting things done.

Time tracker can help your company increase productivity, because business can see what processes or activities lead to wasted time. Many systems automatically tie hours to invoices and generate accurate bills based on a predetermined rate card.

Conversely, if you need more help with projects or workforce management than the features above provide, consider a project management platform with strong time tracking capabilities.

Time tracker which really helps your company should include the following features:

• Integration with project management, accounting, CRM, and HR software

• Data export to files including: .pdf, Excel, .csv, and others

• Data import from other applications

• Unlimited projects

• Custom billing increments

• Expense tracking

• Reports / Analytics

• Track non-billable time

• Job costing reports

• Paid time off (PTO)

• Vacation tracking, attendance/absence management

• Track offline time / idle timeout

• Project/task-based time tracking

• Dashboards with real-time reporting

• Automatic notifications (due dates, overtime, appointments, etc.)

• Task categorization tools, such as tagging or color coding

• User or role-based security

• Data backup

The best time trackers provide an overview of the office or workforce. With CrocoTime time tracker, you can see who is currently working, the total hours worked during a selected time period, what the most recent employee’s activity was, etc.

The time tracker offers reports which can be easily generated and shared with customers, management, or executives.