What is a Timesheet App and How Can It Help My Business?

One of the most important things to understand about your business - or about any business, really - is that "productivity" and "collaboration" can always be improved tomorrow, regardless of how well you think you've handled things today.

Technology is evolving all around us, and the accepted "best practices" of yesterday may be woefully inadequate as soon as tomorrow. To put it another way, the minute you think you've "done enough" to improve both of these core tenants of your business is the moment you've lost a game you never truly understood in the first place.

Case in point: timesheet app solutions. Now, you may say to yourself "what do I need one of those for? I already know when my employees are coming and going. We don't have any problems as far as payroll and scheduling are concerned. How, exactly, is such an app supposed to help me improve the way we work on a daily basis?"

As a matter of fact, there are many, many ways in which a timesheet app can help empower both you and your employees that are more than worth exploring.

What's in a Timesheet App? Breaking Things Down

In a broad sense, a timesheet app is exactly what it sounds like - it's a tech-based employee scheduling solution designed for all of your hourly employees that allows you to create employee schedules in a matter of minutes. Sounds great, right?

In a lot of ways, it is - but if you're ONLY using such a solution for that reason, you're only tapping into a fraction of its full potential.

Many modern day timesheet app solutions allow you to copy work schedules, for example, which means you can use templates to create schedules in a matter of minutes. You can drag and drop shifts into the exact place on the calendar that you need them to be, thus accomplishing quickly what used to take a day or more to get right. There's a reason why investing in this type of solution will forever be on any list of "best management tips" that you find.

Most timesheet app solutions will also allow you to share schedules via a number of different means, including but not limited to text, push notification, email and more. You can instantly (not to mention automatically) remind your team members of their upcoming shift BEFORE it actually starts, thus improving staff accountability and reducing the possibility that someone might be late or not show up at all as well.

Of course, maybe the most important benefit to all of this is that absolutely everything you need to maintain control over your employee schedules is in one place for the first time. Forget about trying to navigate through a bunch of different apps just to pull something together, or wading through volumes of emails in your "Archive" box just to find a message you think you remember about an employee who requested time off.

With just a few quick clicks of your mouse, you can invite people to view their schedules, you can set their availability preferences in a way that allows you to see this information moving forward and more. Plus, employees will love it because the same system that allows you to do all this also allows them to both request time off and pick up any shifts that suddenly become available.

It's a true "win-win" situation in every sense of the term... but once again, the real benefits are far more important than that.

The Power of Having the Right Timesheet App By Your Side

In a long-term sense, the real benefit of having this type of timesheet app at your side has to do with how it can improve communication and collaboration across your enterprise.

With the right tool, you can always make sure that team members are up-to-date and in the loop regarding not only upcoming event schedules, but also things like group chats, direct messages and more.

For the sake of example, let's say that you're about to use a line graph maker like Visme(which I founded) to begin work on that next piece of collateral for your audience. Obviously, you'll want to have a team meeting to make sure that the visual element is exactly where it needs to be, to make sure that the "thesis" of the piece makes sense for the people you're speaking to, and more. Not only can a timesheet app help you schedule this meeting, but it can also help make sure that all key stakeholders actually attend - thus significantly reducing the time it takes to get that collateral out into the world.

Or, let's say that you've spent an extensive amount of time on a site like Respona coming up with topics for upcoming blog posts and white papers for your audience. You've personally invested a large number of hours and you've come up with 100 different pieces that will be written, edited and published over the next few months.

Not only can you use a timesheet app with collaborative features to make sure everyone knows which topic ideas they're accountable for, but you can also let people check in with one another to make sure that all content will be finished exactly when it should be. People can see precisely when certain pieces are going to run and where they're going to be published - thus allowing all employees to see how their efforts fit into the bigger picture while making sure that your publishing schedule stays on track at the same time.

Of course, for any business leader, all of this brings with it the most important benefit of all: you have complete visibility into labor hours and the money you're spending on them as well. Not only can you use this type of tool to track labor and align it to sales activity, but you can also keep a more watchful eye on overtime requests as well. This means that you can always stay in complete control of payroll costs at all times, making sure that you're always getting the highest return for your investment possible.

In the end, is it possible to still run a successful business without this type of tool? Yes - many seasoned business veterans have been doing it for years. But when you see how much more efficient a timesheet app can make you, you'll soon begin to wonder why anyone would ever want to operate without one. If nothing else, you'll certainly have more available time in a day to focus on those matters that actually require your attention - thus improving the quality of the work you're able to do along the way.