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How do you keep a tab on the progress your team is making and the status of various projects? This becomes even more difficult when you have a distributed team or people working remotely. So, what is the solution to efficiently handle all aspects of project management? Especially when it comes to planning the timelines and required resources, you need to know how much time and effort is being spent by your team members. The best way to do all this is to implement a timesheet management software. Such a tool accurately calculates the actual effort and utilization vis-à-vis planned effort and schedules. It also helps in enhancing overall productivity and accountability in people and enables them to capture their time and effort spent on any device, from anywhere. The timesheet entries are used to compute quotes, create multiple reports, and make invoices without any double entries.
Defining Timesheet Management
Timesheet management is a process where all employees enter their time entries and then consolidated timesheets are monitored and analyzed to enhance productivity. These timesheets help in calculating employee payroll or generating invoices for the clients. Nowadays with advancement of technology, online timesheets are a lot more useful and handy. From spreadsheets to AI-backed timesheet management software, various tools are used for timesheet management. But a key question here is: why is timesheet management needed? It is not possible to remember the time you spend on various tasks or activities over the week or a month. Therefore, it is important to enter all such details in a timesheet. This data helps project managers to assess performance, utilization, and productivity of their team against the actual time spent. As maintaining timesheets manually is cumbersome, implementing a timesheet management software is a good idea.
10 Top Timesheet Management Features of eResource Scheduler
eResource Scheduler is a leading and top-rated resource management and timesheet management software available today. A flagship product by Enbraun, it aims to enhance your productivity, performance, and utilization by efficiently managing the resource matrix in all aspects. The eResource Scheduler timesheet management software enables you to know the actuals, capture data on a daily, weekly, monthly basis which is very beneficial for identifying the gaps between planned vs. actual effort and time spent. This resource management software provides you real-time visibility and helps improve coordination among employees and different teams.”
Let’s look at the top 10 timesheet management features of this tool.
1. Gain Visibility into Actual Time Spent on Various Projects
The timesheet management feature allows capturing what is the actual time spent by your team members on various tasks, projects, or non-project activities. This data provides you with clear visibility of the work that is done, by whom, when and compare it with the planned effort.
2. Easy and Quick Timesheet Entries
The tool’s intuitive design and easy-to-understand interface makes it simple for users to enter their timesheet details. It is also quite easy to copy and paste some data and fill from schedule. This feature makes it easy for the users to enter their time-related data quickly and efficiently.
3. Capture all Important Data in the Timesheet
With this timesheet management software, it becomes very easy for you to capture all the key information when you do the time entries. The users can save data such as what tasks they performed, the projects they worked on a specific date, booking (as one project could have multiple bookings), specific role being performed, and the location. Recording all this data enables precise and detailed reporting.
4. Find any Gaps or Leakages with Planned vs. Actual Reports
Using timesheet data along with scheduling estimates helps in generating various comparative reports. For example, planned vs. actual utilization, resource availability, and financial reports. This helps the project managers to do a comparative analysis of the planned effort and timelines vis-a-vis the actual time/effort spent by the team. This also enables spotting any resource gaps or leakages.
5. Automatic or Manual Population of Time Entries
The timesheet management software allows users to enter their time manually or can also automatically populate the same from the resource schedule. If the actual data is very different as compared to the planned data, then manual time entries can be used. But if the actual data is similar to the planned effort and time, then the time can be pre-populated from the resource schedule. After doing so, if any minor changes need to be made, then that can be done before final submission.
6. View and Sign-off Timesheets by Resources and Projects
eResource Scheduler’s intuitive and easy-to-understand approval screen has all the information that an approver may need to quickly view and sign-off the time entries. As per their convenience and requirement, the approver can either view and approve the time entries as per resources or by specific projects.
7. Configure Timesheet Settings at Resource, Project, or Global Level
You can configure your timesheet setting at multi-level, which permits standardizing these settings across all resources and projects. Another option is to select specific settings for individual resources or projects as may be needed.
8. Color-coding to Highlight Status like Submitted, Approved, or Rejected Time Entries
All the team members will have multiple time entries on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis and the status of every time entry would differ. eResource Scheduler has a built-in timesheet management module offering a color-coding feature. This helps to easily find the status of individual time entry. For instance, time entries highlighted in Blue signify ‘Submitted’ status, whereas Green represents that the entry has been ‘Approved’. However, Red signifies that an entry is ‘Rejected’. Thus, by just viewing the colour codes at a glance, anyone can easily know the status.
9. Add Comments for each Time Entries
eResource Scheduler is a timesheet resource management software that allows you to enter comments to detail out the task or activity with each individual time entry. This way, a user can capture all details of what task was done. This also acts as the link of communication between the resource and the approver. If this timesheet is exported to an Excel format, all the time entries are exported along with relevant comments.
10. Import or Integrate Timesheets with Third Party Systems
eResource Scheduler allows analyzing your timesheets or doing comparative reporting even in case you are using a third-party timesheet management system. Wondering how? You simply need to import timesheet data in a spreadsheet or utilize the tool’s open REST API and compose an integration to pull or push that timesheet data.
How can eResource Scheduler Help in Timesheet Management?
If you are working with a distributed team or remote employees and want to track their performance and status of projects, then try using eResource Scheduler, a leading timesheet management software. Your resources can fill in their time entries in this tool and keep monitoring their performance and productivity as compared to the planned effort and schedule. This resource management software provides you real-time visibility and helps improve coordination among employees and different teams. The project managers can monitor and evaluate the utilization metrics and seamlessly manage their remote teams. A leading timesheet management software like eResource Scheduler can be easily integrated with other existing software that you may be using. If you wish to know more about this award-winning tool, book a free trial today and streamline your timesheet management process.
