Time Is (Lost) Money

It's time to keep better time.

No matter what fate awaits us -- fiscal Armageddon or the slow struggle working off our national debt -- for my money, staying in this little small-business thing of ours will be about exactly one thing: fundamentals. Be darn sure you have great product. Keep the good clients happy. And most of all, be efficient. And if there is one glaring agglomeration of inefficiency here on planet small biz, it is the tracking and managing of billable hours.

Think about it. Do you really know how much time you or your people spend on a given job? Because, despite almost 100 years of industrial development and a wave of new digital time-tracking tools, I doubt very much you do.

It's not like companies are not lining up to sell you the technology you need to harness time. Microsoft's (STOCK QUOTE: MSFT) Outlook can work with third-party software like Tracker Office from Automation Center. There are open-source tools like Time Track, more Web-based systems like Teamwork. And time-tracking software is built into major project-management suites like Microsoft Project or NetSuite.

But if your business is like mine, the data we glean from these systems is usually next to worthless. Why? Crooks aside, nobody tracks their time the same way. Some employees -- even those paid by the hour -- downright forget to do their time cards. And even those who do remember do so in differing styles. Do they log their time for every 1, 10, 20 or 30 minutes? How do they count a phone call? Or an unscheduled meeting? I, for one, have never seen a single time sheet that actually matched the employee's invoice, never mind the schedule we set out when we spec'd the assignment. We basically feel our way to who is efficient and who is not pay roll by pay roll.