Review

Turning Time Into Money
By Alexander Auerbach, Entrepreneurial Edge magazine, October, 2001

You pay your employees for the time they put in at work. How good a job does your company do at making sure your customers pay you for the time your employees spend on their projects? If, like many companies, you are still using paper-based time-tracking systems, one of several new software programs could improve the accuracy of your records while sharply reducing your costs.

Tenrox, a software company, has just released version 6.5 of its Tenrox Time & Attendance software, which includes Web-based time tracking. According to Tenrox, time "lost" to lunches, breaks and late arrivals or early departures that don't get properly recorded amounts to more than four hours per week. When time sheets are filled out manually, missing entries or wrong job codes increase costs by about 3%. Using software rather than paper-based systems reduces the time to verify an employee's time card from an average of six minutes to less than one minute.

For a company with 50 employees, according to Tenrox, the savings in recaptured wages, reduced errors and verification activity amount to more than $160,000 per year, or well over $3,000 per employee.

The Time & Attendance feature is also integrated into the company's Tenrox PSA software, which is designed specifically for service, consulting and project-based activities. Tenrox PSA also includes project management, cost accounting, document management and resource planning tools, as well as many other activity-tracking components.

Alexander Auerbach is Editor of Entrepreneurial Edge and EE Direct.