How Does a Multitasker Use a Tool to Track Time with Dynamics ERP?

“There are only so many hours in a day.”

This adage continues to prove true, even in today’s fast-paced, ever-more-demanding workplace. With increased workloads and tight deadlines, modern workers often find themselves working on multiple projects at the same time, to keep up with demand and make the best use of time.

Multitaskers wear the name like a badge; it’s a point of pride to be able to handle whatever your boss (or your clients) throws at you and just ‘make it happen’. However, “multitasking” is a bit of a misnomer; scientific studies show that we are only able to focus on one thing at a time. However, we can switch very quickly between tasks – and that fact works to our advantage in productivity as well as capturing our time for billing purposes.

For those whose primary billable product is the hour – that is to say, professional services such as lawyers, consultants, and the like – capturing all the time spent on a client or a project is a real challenge. Worse, as one is juggling the demands of several projects at a time, the tendency is to hop from one thing to another at will. While you wait on a response from one client, you might handle some light research for another, until you receive a call from another customer who wants to open a new case. Finally, you receive the email from the client you were waiting for, and you can finish the paperwork to close out his file.

How do you get all THAT on a timesheet with Microsoft Dynamics ERP?

It’s for precisely those reasons that management and accounting staff are locked in a constant battle with consultants. Management needs their timesheets; consultants, trying to keep up the pace, find little time and absolutely no joy in filling out that horrible grid or spreadsheet. It’s too hard and takes too much of their precious, scarce time.

Traditional time-tracking solutions, in a respectable effort, try to capture time digitally, perhaps with a handy window that floats on top of other applications on your screen. But if you’re not diligent and disciplined about time entries, then at the end of the day or week, you’re facing the same troubles as before – and now you’re paying for an expensive software solution on top of it.

There is a better way to track time with Dynamics 365 ERP!

Luckily, there is. The best time-tracking solution simply gets out of the way and lets you work, handling the heavy lifting for you. That’s the approach we took with TiM – Time is Money. How does this work for the modern multitasker?

Email and Calendar functionality is essential for nearly everyone in today’s workplace. Microsoft Outlook is by far the most used application for both functions. Rather than forcing you to learn a new application and a new interface, TiM integrates with Outlook to help you capture your time on familiar turf – effortlessly and in real time while you’re working.

With TiM for Dynamics 365, you can capture time in three simple ways:

1. Manual Entry. You might not think that manual time entries are a big improvement over other solutions – until you use them. In the TiM Calendar, you simply click on the appropriate time slot and write a description. That’s it! Optionally, you can categorize the entry and stretch or shrink the box to add or subtract time from the task visually. In a hurry? Save the extra clicks for your end-of-day review – you’ve already accomplished the hardest part.
2. Copy From Your Outlook Calendar to Dynamics 365. The TiM Calendar lives right alongside your other calendars in Outlook. Did you have today’s long meeting with the client marked off on your business calendar? Drag a copy over to the TiM Calendar and you’ve just billed for it.
3. Automatic Time Capture with TiM and Dynamics ERP Software. This is the multitasker’s secret weapon. TiM keeps a private history of your email and application activity down to the second. So after you’ve filled out your TiM Calendar for the day, you may notice some empty spaces. You know you’ve been busy, so what were you doing? TiM’s uncategorized history lets you comb through your day quickly, displaying entries that reveal how much time you spent on each activity and allowing you to convert those to billable entries in a couple of clicks.

With TiM for Microsoft Dynamics 365, gone are the days of your boss breathing down your neck for a timesheet. You won’t lose hours every month trying to piece together your activity for a final report. In fact, you’ll find another compelling reason to track your time: billing for all those forgotten activities – like reading and responding to emails, for example – and you’ll watch revenues climb without doing anything more than you’re doing now.

Learn more about the TiM Time Capture Methodology from our website, HandsFree.biz. There you’ll find videos that highlight the ease with which you can track your time, and you can learn more about how TiM integrates with Microsoft Dynamics 365, which ensures your billable hours go straight to the invoice being sent to your client.

And when you’re ready to automatically add to your bottom line, contact us!

By HandsFree | www.handsfree.biz

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