Time Tracking Manifesto

Clockk, unlike most time tracking tools, is highly opinionated.

We’ve talked with thousands of people: graphic designers, digital marketers, bookkeepers and more. We spoke with people from independent consultants to Managing Directors of multinational agencies.

We’ve learned how painful timesheets are, but also how useful they are. We’ve heard stories of how accurate time tracking resulted in an agency saving dozens of jobs and winning more bids. We’ve seen software consultancies improve utilization by 5% and increase profit by a whopping 40%!

We’ve talked to the people whose incomplete timesheets got them locked out of their computer... which led to the “walk of shame” to IT.

We created Clockk to solve a specific problem that we experienced in our consultancy. After the conversations we’ve had with folks with similar issues, our opinions on what time tracking is, why it’s important, and how it should be done are rock solid.

This is our manifesto.

At Clockk, we believe that accurate time tracking is the most important lever of profitability in your business. Knowing how and where you and your staff spend their time will make the difference between “keeping the lights on” and a 40%+ profit margin.

That said,

We believe time tracking is an administrative pain for every professional services organization. Time spent doing timesheets could be spent delivering value for clients. Timesheets cause stress. People dread doing timesheets.

However,

We believe that good tools, processes, and company culture can make timesheets bearable.

We believe good timesheets are accurate, but not necessarily precise. A good timesheet captures everything you worked on so that you can bill honestly and fairly. Aiming for precision will increase stress and will not meaningfully change your top-line revenue.

We believe that the best time to do your timesheets is right now. The second-best time is right now. The longer you wait, the more you’ll dread them, because you won’t be able to remember what you did. And if you put them off longer, you’ll forget more, and the vicious cycle continues.

We believe that it is basically impossible to track your time accurately using pen and paper or start/stop timers. Especially when working on many projects in a single day.

Employees and Agency/Consultancy Time Tracking

We believe creative/knowledge workers prefer to spend their time doing good work.. They need tools and space to explore their passion and deliver value for your clients.

We believe that most creative/knowledge workers can’t do 8 hours of billable work every day. People fall ill, they get tired, they have arguments with their spouse. They help their peers work through problems. They get pulled into unplanned meetings. Requiring a daily billable hours minimum will cause inaccurate timesheets, or worse, burnout.

Consultancy owners/managers/directors - Perspective on timesheets

We believe that having the right tools to accurately understand an employee’s utilization rate gives managers the insight to effectively lead their workforce. By spotting inconsistencies or patterns in an employee’s performance, leaders can proactively spot problems and opportunities within their team.

We believe that owners who don’t work directly on client projects are still delivering value to their clients, and may be missing opportunities to bill that value. They just need a better way to capture it.

What Clients are looking for in a timesheet

We believe that clients want their vendors to be honest and fair.

We believe clients don’t need a description of every hour. A line or two to summarize the work for the day is more than enough. In fact, they usually don’t need a description at all, but they do appreciate it when they get one.

Getting Creatives to track their time

We believe that creativity can’t be timed. A flash of inspiration can happen at work, at dinner, or during the night.

However,

We believe that if you’re not ringing the cash register, you’re no good to the organization. It’s up to you to figure out how you’re going to translate a flash of brilliance into a timesheet entry.

Read more: Top 5½ ways to get creatives to do their timesheets

Account Managers and Project Managers - tracking their own time and others’ time

We believe you are NOT overhead. You are a revenue center. You just need better tools to more effectively capture the time you spend on client work.

We believe that yours are the hardest roles in a consultancy. You are torn between the needs of your clients and the needs of the staff you support. No one jumps more between projects than you do, and no one struggles more to attach that jumping around to billable hours.

We believe that your timesheet struggle is double everyone else’s. Not only do you have to do your own timesheets, but you are responsible for the timesheets of the people on your team as well.

How Software developers should track their time

We believe that software developers love to overcomplicate project management and time tracking systems. We empathize! Software developers love the feeling of precise systems that run smoothly, generating lots of potentially valuable data.

However...

We believe that tracking time against tickets in a project management system such as JIRA is meaningless. Tickets are either too broad or too narrow. A feature may take multiple days or weeks to implement, making you lose resolution on what you did on any particular day. Or a text change that is so simple that time tracked against it is negligible. Worse, the time in between tickets gets lost completely or is disguised in context-free “chore” tickets.

We believe that although you think you’re going to refer back to the time you tracked when you bid on your next project, you probably won’t.

Companies that aren’t professional services (e.g. SaaS, nonprofits, enterprise, manufacturers) should not be tracking time

We believe that companies that don’t bill hourly should not bother forcing their employees to keep timesheets. Management wants to know how people are spending their time but deep down, the employees know that tracking their time is burdensome and if they don’t do it, there are no repercussions.

We believe that for these companies, a 2-week highly detailed study of where everyone’s time is spent is useful. It’s an achievable, actionable exercise, worth doing every 3-5 years.

We believe that if staff must track time in these contexts, the number of hours they write down for any project on any day should be divisible by 2, if not 4.

If you believe what we believe, then you’re in the right place! Clockk is devoted to giving freelancers, agencies and consultancies the tools they need to make good decisions... and be ridiculously profitable!

Clockk is a time machine for your workweek. Working behind the scenes, Clockk helps multitasking professionals keep an accurate record of their time while they work the way they want to.

Sign up for free to see how Clockk can help you invoice clients accurately, prevent timesheet dead, increase your profit margin, and help you plan for success.