QuickBooks Time Tracking for Field Service Businesses

Can you use QuickBooks to track employee time for your field service business?

Time tracking can sometimes become a major source of frustration for business owners. Unlike the goods and services you provide, time is not tangible. Nevertheless, effectively managing time is essential to running a successful business. Fortunately, QuickBooks provides several tools to make this much less of a headache.

Employee Tracking

Keeping track of your employees is the first step to making sure your business operates as efficiently as possible in terms of time management. Employees should clock in and out daily, making sure to use additional timestamps for their breaks and lunches. Having timestamps in place helps establish accountability for your employees.

In order for the timestamps to work though, you need a system for your employees to clock in and out of the jobs that they have to do throughout the day. This ensures that while your employees are clocked in, they are actually performing to the standards that you hold them to. Regularly performing audits to check that the timestamps reported match up with a reasonable time of completion expectation will help you identify inefficient processes or workers. By performing regular audits, you can fine tune your estimates. 

QuickBooks makes it easy to track timestamps related to the jobs or services that you provide, but they do not have a built-in solution for clocking in and out for a work day. That’s where applications like Smart Service come in. While using the direct QuickBooks add-on Smart Service, your employees can clock in and out for the day, and clock in and out of a job from their mobile device (a smartphone or tablet). The timestamps they make doing this immediately get sent back to Smart Service, where they sync with QuickBooks. For more information on how this process works, check out this article that goes into more detail about how Smart Service can handle time tracking for you. If you would like more details on how QuickBooks handles timestamps, you can take a look at this article which describes how to set up time tracking in QuickBooks.

Personal Time Tracking

As the boss, your time is one of the most valuable assets your company has. The decisions you make and how long it takes you to make them can ultimately lead to the success or failure of your business. The most successful business owners have a system for how they manage their time, both on the clock and off.

The key concept here is defining your work day. As the owner, it is easy to avoid drawing a definitive line of when you are working and when you are not, because everything you do is “for your business.” This is a trap that many business owners fall into.

Essentially, when you define your work day, you set yourself up to reach your goals within a set timeframe. In a lot of cases, business owners without a clearly defined work schedule succumb to the illusion that they have “all day” to accomplish a particular task, when in reality they have other needs to attend to like spending time with their families or taking care of personal responsibilities unrelated to the business. When you have a definite work schedule, you know exactly when you need to finish a task, and have the added pressure of staying on schedule to make sure that you get that task done. 

With that said, you are the boss, and your work day does not need to mirror that of your employees. For example, let’s consider a business owner that works with overseas suppliers on the other side of the planet. The difference in time zones will likely dictate that communication with the supplier takes place outside of normal business hours. Because of this, it is important to consider the special tasks you need to accomplish ahead of time and incorporate these into your schedule. 

Apps like Google Calendar can help you block off the time that you will need to accomplish your tasks. Defining these helps you hold yourself accountable. Consider sharing your calendar with those who need to know when you are available, such as your office managers or domestic partner. 

When blocking out time for the day, it is helpful to include windows where you can tackle specific, everyday tasks (like responding to emails). Ordinarily you can get distracted from this kind of thing, since it has no definitive deadline. Setting aside time for this sort of thing allows your staff to approach you with any concerns that they may have in a much more efficient and structured manner. If your staff knows that you have this time blocked off, you are less likely to have things “pop up out of the blue” at random points throughout the day, distracting you from accomplishing more important tasks. 

Having a set schedule is all about improving efficiency and not wasting time. If you follow the advice given in this article, you will certainly see where your time management and time tracking can improve. Finding these inefficiencies will save you tons of money in the long run!