How much time do you spend tracking time?

Time tracking for technical assistance is an increasingly important tool in the financing industry. Funders often want to know how much time a team spends implementing their programs, and many grant funds require teams to report on time spent in order to secure funding.

Internally, time tracking allows teams to identify if there are parts of projects that regularly take more time than other parts. Noting these kinds of bottlenecks is the starting point for creating more efficiency in your process, and making data-informed decisions about changes that need to be made.

What are the barriers that keep teams from having a robust system for time tracking?

• Systems that aren’t intuitive and/or are isolated from other systems

• Lack of uniform entries across the whole team

• Frustration of needing to enter data that should be readily available

• No obvious place to do it

Uniform Process Teamwide

When the subject of tracking time comes up, many teams kind of chuckle and admit to using a “system” that involves post-it notes, random typed notes, and a scramble at the end of the month to find and compile a summary of how each team member spent their time.

When entries are not uniform across team members, the entries become less and less helpful. On the other hand, teams that are prompted to submit time tracking entries the same way across all members can see immediate ability to review and analyze the entries. Effective time tracking solutions offer continuity across product and program names, language used, and format of entries.

Ease of Entry

The irony of time tracking is that the amount of time spent completing a time tracking report can take just as much time as some of the tasks that you are reporting on! Whether that be typing into a shared sheet or logging into and navigating a time tracking website, many current time tracking solutions are clunky and inefficient.

At the heart of time tracking is one simple concept: How much time did you spend working with a client? Time tracking solutions that require staff to provide many pieces of additional information distract from the core task of reporting time, and may even be complicated enough that staff avoid providing entries all together.

An effective time tracking tool will save time by asking for just the core information. Imagine the ease of using a time tracking system that only asks you 1) how much time did you spend with this client and 2) what did you work on in that time? It takes less than a minute to complete a time tracking entry like this.

Compatible with Loan Origination System

When loan officers and other team members need to learn and use a totally different system to submit time tracking entries than they’ve been using for the rest of a process, they may begin to drag their feet or altogether forget to submit time tracking reports.

The advantages of a time tracking system that is compatible with your loan origination system are endless.

Not only can your team keep working in one location, they can also submit time tracking entries that are directly connected to the application they are working on. The ease of submitting an entry is multiplied when most of the information is already available, and the only new information needed is the time entry itself.

Another advantage is that if multiple team members contribute to the same project, a compilation of their time spent remains connected to that application. At the end of a project, you're able to easily see the total time spent on that project across all team members.

Would a time tracking solution that integrates with your loan system and takes less than one minute for your team to use save you time? We'd love to share more about how Lenderfit's time tracking solution does this, and more.