Top 5 Reasons to Track Your Creative Time

Looking back at my 15+ years of work experience, I think I’m at about 50/50 for companies that forced me to track my time, versus those that did not care about it.  I’m glad to be back in an organization such as Function Point, who value the information time-tracking can provide, and give us all an easy way to do it. Still, I speak to plenty of agencies and creative businesses who do not see the huge potential of gathering, storing and using the data from time sheets.

Here are what I consider the best reasons to push yourself and your team to use a system such as Function Point to track time:

1) Even if your creative agency charges a flat fee for jobs, wouldn’t it be good to know for sure you’re charging enough?  If what you assume takes 2 hours, really takes 4, that could mean thousands of dollars each year never being realized.

2) Do you need more staff? As a department head, or traffic manager, how will you show just how swamped you might be, without a pile of time sheets to back you up?

3) Help keep your creative team focussed – knowing that at the end of the day you need to account for what you’ve been up, you’re much less likely to get off track with a legit task like research, or with less legit distractions…I still say 10 minutes on cuteoverload.com is ok though.

4) Enable your staff to shine. The data you can glean from timesheet reports will enable you to see who excels where, and who might be your best picks to assign certain tasks to. Get your team working smarter, not harder.

5) Tap into your inner fortune teller – there’s nothing like timesheet data to better scope out your future work. You’ll see rapid improvement in accurate milestone setting, and put yourself in a position to exceed client expectations.

So long as you have a user-friendly way to enable staff to track time, there’s no excuse not to! And if you’re looking for a user-friendly way to track time – get in touch with us for a no-obligation product demo.