Maximize Efficiency with QuickBooks Timesheets for Small Businesses

Overtime can either be a blessing or a curse for small businesses. While it allows you to meet deadlines and handle unexpected surges in workload, it can also hurt your labor costs and employee morale.

All businesses have to sustain productivity to make profits. However, compared to larger companies and sole proprietorships, small businesses have to be more innovative in how they manage overtime. QuickBooks timesheets offers small businesses valuable tools to navigate these challenges.

Both the web and mobile user Interface are well-organized, with the main features — time clock, schedule, projects, who’s working, time entries, time off, approvals, reports, and team management all easily accessible to save time and improve decision-making whether on the field or on the go.

In addition to time tracking and workforce management, Tsheets provides valuable insights through its reporting capabilities. It enables small businesses to generate detailed reports on labor costs, project profitability, and employee output. These reports can help identify areas for improvement, optimize resource allocation, and make decision-making easier.

What is QuickBooks Timesheets?

QuickBooks timesheets, also called QuickBooks Time, is an application that helps businesses manage their workforce. But the app is not just a digital timesheet as its name suggests. It is an all-in-one solution with employee time tracking apps, scheduling, and project management.

To start with, QuickBooks Time simplifies the process of recording work hours. You no longer have to record and calculate overtime manually. With QuickBooks time tracking, employees can easily clock in and out either on a PC or a mobile device. This not only saves time but also reduces errors.

GPS tracking ensures that field personnel are where they need to be. The time keeping software also includes scheduling tools to help create and manage employee shifts, reducing labor costs and improving efficiency.

There are features like geofencing and facial recognition too. Geofencing improves privacy and productivity by ensuring that employees use designated work locations, while facial recognition adds an extra layer of security to prevent time theft.

Is your small business already using QuickBooks accounting software? Then, you should consider enhancing it with QuickBooks Time. The seamless integration between the two platforms can streamline operations, reduce errors, and save time.

1. Accurate Time Tracking with QuickBooks

QuickBooks time tracker ensures precise time recording, eliminating the guesswork and errors often associated with manual timekeeping. Here's how one of the best time tracking apps for employees helps your business:

1. Real-time tracking: QuickBooks timesheets allows employees to clock in and out with just a few clicks or taps. This eliminates errors and ensures all hours are accounted for. This feature works whether you are online or offline. When not connected to the internet, QuickBooks time tracking stores employee work time data locally and then synchronizes when the app reconnects.
2. Project and task tracking: But what about your field service team? No problem! The mobile app allows them to easily track hours on the go, whether they're at a client's site or on the road.But QuickBooks time tracking goes beyond just hours worked.
3. Project and task tracking: QuickBooks Timesheets allow you to allocate time to specific projects and tasks. This not only helps with overtime calculations but also provides valuable insights into project budgeting, billing, and profitability analysis.
4. GPS tracking (if available): For businesses requiring even stricter time verification, some versions of QuickBooks Timesheets offer GPS tracking, ensuring employees are where they say they are. The feature is especially valuable for field service companies when assigning duties. If you have concerns over privacy, the GPS feature is only active when you log in and stops tracking once you clock out.

2. Streamlining Overtime Calculations and Approvals

Remember the days of spending hours hunched over spreadsheets, calculating overtime? QuickBooks timesheets takes that burden away with its automated system.

Here's how it works:

1. Customizable overtime rules: it has customizable overtime rules based on your industry standards or company policies. For example, you might define overtime as anything over 40 hours a week with a pay rate of 1.5 times the regular rate.
2. Automatic calculations: With these rules in place, the time keeping software automatically calculates regular and overtime hours, ensuring accuracy and compliance with labor laws.
3. Overtime approval workflows: What’s more? QuickBooks intuit timesheets allows you to establish a clear approval workflow for overtime requests. This way, you can manage who can authorize overtime and ensure only approved hours are paid out.
4. Generate reports: Finally, you can generate detailed reports to analyze overtime costs by employee, project, or department. These reports are invaluable for identifying trends, spotting potential overtime hotspots, and making data-driven decisions to optimize your staffing and project timelines.

3. Integration with Payroll for Efficiency and Accuracy

Imagine a world where time tracking data flows seamlessly into your payroll system, eliminating the need for manual data entry and reducing the risk of errors. This is the magic of QuickBooks timesheets integration with QuickBooks Payroll.

1. Ensure Smooth Automated Data transfer: With this integration, employee hours and overtime are automatically transferred, saving you and your team significant time and frustration when preparing paychecks.
2. Accurate paychecks: Additionally, it ensures accurate pay calculations, preventing disputes and boosting employee satisfaction.
3. Maintain compliance: To promote employee well-being and comply with federal and state labor laws regarding overtime pay, the app includes a break tracker to monitor rest periods. This addresses the risk of penalties and audits which is harder to achieve when using manual systems.

4. Keeping Overtime Costs in Check

Labor costs accrued from overtime can quickly spiral out of control. QuickBooks timesheets offers tools to help you stay on top of it:

1. Set budgets: Determine how much you can afford to spend on overtime and stick to it.
2. Analyze labor costs: Break down your labor costs to identify overtime hotspots and areas for improvement.
3. Predict the future: Use historical data to forecast future labor costs and adjust your staffing levels or project plans accordingly.

5. Boost Morale: Happy Employees, Happy Business

Nobody likes feeling overworked and underpaid. QuickBooks timesheets can help you keep your employees happy through:

1. Transparency: Employees can see their hours and overtime clearly. This reduces misunderstandings and disputes.
2. Fairness: Accurate overtime calculations show employees that the company values their time and is committed to fair pay.
3. Less paperwork: Streamlined time tracking means less hassle for your employees. Workers do not need to be tech-savvy to use QuickBook’s time tracker. The user-friendly interface allows them to easily track time, manage their calendar, request time-offs, and view paid time off (PTO) balances.

6. Additional Benefits of QuickBooks Timesheets

Beyond overtime management, QuickBooks Timesheets offers several other advantages for small businesses:

1. Improved productivity: Accurate time tracking helps identify time-wasting activities and improve overall efficiency.
2. Enhanced project management: Detailed time tracking data can help project managers monitor progress, allocate resources effectively, and improve project profitability. To improve project management even further, small businesses should incorporate collaboration software such as Qbox into their workflow.

This app connects securely with QuickBooks to allow multiple users to share and sync multiple files including QuickBooks, Word, Excel, PPT, PDF, and JPG attachments.

3. Better decision-making: Data-driven insights from QuickBook Tsheets reports can inform business decisions related to staffing, budgeting, and project management.

How to Create a Timesheets in QuickBooks

1. Select Payroll from the left-hand menu
2. Select Manage Employees and select Create Timesheets
3. Choose a particular employee from the Select an Employee population
4. Select the Week / Fortnightly ending date and whether you want to Show/Hide Timesheets Costs
5. Enter in the timesheet for the employee, then select Save

Things to Note

To clear the timesheet line, click the red x on the right-hand side of the line. Managers should note that QuickBooks timesheets that have already been approved or are under review cannot be edited or cleared. This also applies to rejected timesheets..

You only need to fill out the rows that are relevant to a particular employee. For instance, you do not need to enter QuickBooks hours tracking for an employee who did not report to work.

If the user has “Approve Timesheets” rights, the Save button will have an additional option to Save and approve. To do this, select the arrow on the right-hand side of the Save button.

Conclusion

By effectively managing overtime with QuickBooks Time, small businesses can reduce labor costs, improve operational efficiency, enhance employee satisfaction, and make data-driven decisions to drive their operations forward. To start using Qbox to collaborate on QuickBooks, sign up for a subscription today and get a 30-day free trial.