Track time: Overview

The built-in time tracker in TaxDome allows you to accurately track hours worked, set hourly rates for different services and generate invoices from the time entry list. Additionally, you can use time entries to plan the team's capacity, evaluate the team’s performance, and calculate employees' payroll. This article will cover how to start working with time entries and when you might need them.

Time entries, explained

In TaxDome, you can start the time tracker and log your time when working on something. You can also record it manually at any time later. 

Here's what is possible with time entries in TaxDome:

• Find out how many time spent for a job/task. Track time right from the job/task card.
• Convert time tracked to money paid: Track your and your team's work and pay them based on the hourly rate.
• Bill your clients: Issue invoices for your clients using the selected time entries.
• Analyze time utilization: Generate reports on work hours and assess overall efficiency. Analyze reports and determine if hiring more staff is necessary.
• Plan the weekly team capacity: Set weekly capacity for your team members, compare it to the actual time worked and analyze the workload.
• Plan job budget: Assess the time allocated for a job versus the actual time spent.

Before you start

Before you start using time entries, it's important to understand the differences in access rights between different roles. 

By default, viewing and editing all time entries and their rates and viewing the WIP table are available only to firm owners and admins. Team members can access only their own time entries and link them to jobs they have access to.

However, if you want team members to manage all the time entries and rates in them, you can set their access rights accordingly:

• Manage time entries: View and edit all time entries.
• Manage rates in time entries: Change the cost of services and view rates when creating time entries.
• Manage invoices: Generate invoices from time entries.
• Manage time budget. Set time budget for jobs or compare the allocated time with the time which was already spent on doing jobs.

Track time

TaxDome offers you several options for tracking time. You can do it in real time and start logging your work from any page or job card. Or, if you want to record time spent retroactively – for example, after a meeting or consultation – you can manually set the duration.

The other convenient way of tracking time is from a job or task card while the team member works. This way, the time entry is automatically linked to a job, and the time spent by different team members is summed up. 

Bill your clients

After you complete working on a project, you can select all time entries related to this project and generate an invoice from them. All rates and services will be automatically summed up and included in your client's invoice.

There is a separate WIP page where all billable but not yet billed time entries are grouped by client, making it easy to see total unbilled time and total unbilled revenue and clear out the WIP. 

Analyze time utilization

The Time Utilization Dashboard, which is a part of a powerful Reporting tool, allows you to analyze the time utilization of all your employees. It provides insights on efficiency and revenue potential, guiding better pricing, resource allocation and client relationship strategies.

Plan the weekly team capacity

You can set the weekly capacity for your team members individually (e.g., for contractors) or in bulk (for full-time employees). After they track time, you can use the Reporting tool to compare their weekly capacity in hours with the actual time they worked. You can build these reports for different time periods depending on what you want to achieve with them: check on new employees, find out the remaining capacity for the team or detect overloaded employees during the tax season.

Plan the job time budget

In TaxDome, you can use time tracking to compare the expected time for a job versus the actual time spent on it. This is key to ensuring accurate billing and workload management. 

When the job is created, the responsible team member can set the time budget for it. Employees working on the job are supposed to track time, after it's done, time entries are accumulated and compared to the allocated budget. This helps you plan the team capacity better and provide more accurate estimations to your clients.

Tip: Check out TaxDome Academy for comprehensive course on time tracking.