Why Abtrac, Better Business
We live in the 21st century and people still are using Excel timesheets!
These are the same people that get excited about driverless cars, being able to order your dinner from your smartphone or even having robots vacuum their house. The companies that give you these products are guaranteed not to record their precious information in something as simple as Excel, and neither should you.
Here are the signs it’s time to replace your Excel timesheets:
Human Error
First and foremost if you’re a company that invoices based on what’s in your Excel timesheets you cannot afford to have mistakes in your data. Yet studies have reported that nearly 9 out of 10 spreadsheets contain errors.
If you think about the implications of something as simple as formula gone wrong in your Excel timesheet, these errors can be quite scary. Can you afford to have an employee that is entering their Excel timesheets only to make a mistake that gets handed to another department for billing?
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By not using a fully integrated system you’re wasting time
If you have to have an Excel spreadsheet for each component of your business i.e clients, jobs, job stages, employee scheduling, timesheets and invoicing, think of how much double entry you have just for one person to link all these sections together when it comes to your invoicing or any reporting you may want to do.
Wouldn’t it be easier while entering your timesheets if you can just select the information from something that’s already been set up by the project manager?
How then do you get the information from your Excel timesheets to your accounting package? By having all your information in an integrated system you can click a button and push that information to your accounting package without having to do any more double entry saving you hours each month.
Bottlenecks
Say you have a company of 10 who are extremely busy all week long. Then on Friday they are back in the office and need to update their timesheets for next month’s billing or payroll. Have you ever tried to open an Excel document and seen this message?
With your old Excel timesheets, they can’t all access it at once without the possibility of overwriting what someone else has done. More time is wasted. Nine people sitting around doing nothing while someone updates their timesheets has a cost. Let's say a whole week's timesheet takes someone half an hour to complete. You can do the maths and see how much you’re paying people to wait for a system that’s being used. With a purpose-built system, this isn’t a problem as everyone can log in all at once and do what they need to do.
The skill required to create an effective Excel timesheet
So you have some skills in Excel and decide that you will just build your own Excel timesheet system. Sure that’s an option but countless times people will underestimate the time they will have to spend creating that system. Or they will start to create something and end up getting busy with something else or simply running out of time and then leave it as a solution that’s “close enough” but not really what they need.
Why re-invent the wheel? Experts have spent hundreds or thousands of people hours to create something that’s been tried and tested by industry experts specifically to fit your industry. Leave the hassle of managing issues and adding improvements to someone whose job is just that. This can save your frustration time so you can spend it on something you would rather be doing such as reeling in more clients or relaxing at the beach.
Access anywhere and remove the required infrastructure
Most of your Excel timesheets will be hosted on your local server which requires an IT expert to give you access to the network when you are outside of your office through a VPN or other means.
With a dedicated timesheet system, you can access your clients, jobs, and schedule and do your timesheets wherever you are. No excuses from team members that they couldn’t do their timesheets for this day.
These are only some of the reasons why you need to look at moving your Excel timesheets to a fully integrated system. For some people, this is a scary change but if you move to an integrated system they will have the ability to bring the data from your existing Excel timesheets so that you're not starting from scratch, and a commercial system should have free support and a free trial.
If you would like some advice on how to approach the move or if you have any other questions contact us.
