ACCOUNTING is the process of managing the financial operations of a business. This definition is quite straightforward, yet it conceals an enormous diversity of tasks an accountant may be engaged in on a daily basis.
As part of their job, accountants do such things as:
- Payroll administration,
- Budget development,
- Financial audits and analyses,
- Cost and income control (i.e., reporting and invoicing), etc.
And since accountants deal with numbers and money, they always should be exact, efficient and focused while performing these activities. Not to mention that, as solo entrepreneurs or agency owners, accountants are often preoccupied with such matters as project management, price negotiation, cost-efficiency and work productivity. With all these chores and worries at hand, it seems that the life of a professional accountant may be a real challenge.
However, actiTIME is here to the rescue! In this article, we’ll explain how our smart time tracking tool can enable you to complete different accounting tasks and help you achieve better business results with ease.
Get an Accurate Record of All Your Working Time
It’s obvious why the accountants who charge clients per hour need to track their billable time — in this case, the sum of hours spent on accounting services equals the amount of money received after the work is completed. In other words, billable time tracking guarantees that you’re paid correctly and don’t do anything for your clients for free.
But the tracking of non-billable time provides some massive benefits as well. It allows to:
- Obtain a more realistic picture of work-related costs since even those activities that are not concerned with accounting directly (e.g., research, planning, team communication, etc.) attract expenses.
- Collect data on the use of time in your team, identify which tasks consume your resources most, detect time wasters and see if some processes, behaviors and workflows could be improved.
It means that by tracking non-billable time, you’ll gain a chance to promote savings and raise the quality of your productivity-boosting strategies. And actiTIME will let your keep an account of ALL YOUR WORKING TIME at once. Plus, by using the actiTIME Chrome Extension or the mobile app, you’ll be able to track hours automatically, which will help you stay in the know of where each minute of your time goes.
Streamline Accounting and Build Credibility with Clients
As part of your job, you may spend days or weeks working on accounting tasks for others. However, by using the right tools, you may save much time on your own accounting activities.
actiTIME, for instance, allows users to accurately track labor costs based on employee rates and use these data for payroll management. Plus, it supports automatic billing and invoicing and can be integrated with QuickBooks — and many more excellent software tools — for a streamlined export of pre-accounting data.
actiTIME also has a powerful reporting feature that enables users to generate comprehensive documents outlining all the details on tasks performed and the amount of time applied to complete them. You may use these reports to increase pricing transparency and justify the cost of your services with considerable ease.
Make Estimation and Budgeting More Accurate
Having explicit historical information on project expenses and revenues is important if you want to make accurate forecasts and develop realistic budgets. And that’s where actiTIME reports and cost tracking functionality come in handy too.
Just configure the tool to keep a record of labor expenses and billing time by setting preferred user rates and, after a while, you’ll get a thorough overview of project costs and revenues. Consequently, you may implement these financial performance data to estimate future projects and design evidence-based budgets for them. And of course, using actiTIME, you may monitor compliance with your estimates and budgets in real time and make sure your business expenses always stay under control.
Plan Projects and Monitor Progress to Improve Outcomes
Workload planning and progress tracking are the intrinsic parts of project management. They foster discipline and allow for optimized use of resources. As a result of proper planning and monitoring, you gain a higher chance to maximize positive performance outcomes and prevent the risk of cost and schedule overruns.
Planning and progress control is core to the effective realization of your accounting projects as well. And actiTIME will readily assist you in allocating your business resources just right and ensure the successful completion of each task within the budget and by the deadline. The features that will help you with that are:
- Scope management — You can use it to design custom work structures, create new projects and add the info on task estimates, deadlines and types of work.
- Automatic notifications — actiTIME may be configured to notify you about the risks of budget and schedule overruns via emails. It will keep you informed on the approaching deadlines and help you stay motivated to comply with initial estimates.
- Kanban board — This work management system allows for an effortless overview of project progress with just a quick look at current task statuses. Apply the Kanban board to understand what’s already done and which pieces of work are yet to be completed.
Boost Efficiency at Zero Cost
When managing your own agency or independent practice, the last thing you want to do is spend hours and hours integrating a piece of software into your workflows and learning how to run it. actiTIME will rid you of this problem — our time tracker has a user-friendly interface and a flexible configuration, which will make it reasonably easy for you to tailor the tool specifically to your needs and start applying it without a hitch.
These actiTIME qualities, as well as its multiple useful features, will contribute to process efficiency in your business. And if you plan to implement this time tracker alone or as part of a small team, all of its benefits will be available to you for free!
