DEV Community: Harshita Joshi

Why is Time Tracking An Essential Need of Any Business?

Harshita Joshi — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:09:01 +0000

"Time = life; therefore, waste your time and waste of your life, or master your time and master your life." - Alan Lakein

According to research, around 81% of the largest organizations track their employees' activity, including logs, emails, text, tasks, etc.

The question arises in every mind: Why is a time tracking an essential need of any business? If you've never done time tracking before, you may be surprised to learn that many experts consider it the backbone of their business. Time tracking is equally crucial for all the members of an organization or of society in general. Whether you are a manager, executive, CEO, or an ordinary team member, knowing where your time is going is crucial.

What is Time tracking? Why is it important to keep track of time?

Time tracking allows you to monitor the hours devoted to individual tasks and the project as a whole. This transparency helps you to evaluate the accuracy of work estimates and the productivity of your workforce. It is essential for professional service providers, companies with hourly employees or works with freelancers, and companies that use cost-plus pricing.

Time tracking is not only to judge productivity or profitability; it is a means of identifying exactly how much we work, how we waste our time, and how to complete and serve the project on a given deadline.

How to Prioritize Your Time?

Reasonably, not everything available on your to-do list needs to be done immediately. Yes, some great concepts can help you take your game to another level. However, it would allow if you authenticated what is relevant in a particular situation.

Know the strengths and shortcomings of your projects with the possibilities and caveats you encounter. As soon as you are clear about what you are aiming for, you will determine the task's importance correctly.

By using these two metrics to analyze tasks is beneficial:

● How is this task beneficial for the company or organization, e.g., productivity or profit?
● To what extent is this task beneficial for us?
By using these ideas, you can prioritize your task effectively.

What are the benefits of time tracking?

Following are the benefits of time tracking software:

It helps to increase productivity

Using time tracking software helps employers track their employees' productivity and determine how efficient they are.

Once you have a detailed report, you can give the team feedback and tell them some tips on how to be more productive or relevant towards their work or how to manage things effortlessly. In the end, they will be able to perform better.

Offer Real-Time Analytics for the project

They provide a real-time view of employees and examine activity to know why they are less productive, how employees are spending their time, and share your feedback based on the data.

Enhanced Security

Time tracking tools allow you to view installed applications, stored documents, visited sites, and sent texts on company property such as Desktop, laptop, and mobiles.

It also checks or monitors company account data, files, and customer information. It can protect your corporation from insider threats, unusual behavior, and security breaches.

Efficient Project Management

Employee productivity software helps to manage your task by scheduling, organizing, and prioritizing tasks. Here you can prepare and schedule work by examining the time it takes an employee to complete the assigned task.

Streamlined communication channel

Effective teamwork is one of the essential things in solving problems and streamlining things accordingly. Tracking software helps employers schedule text messages, videos, emails, conferences, and more from a single platform.

Effective communication channels help to generate new ideas for completing your task in more effective ways.

Improves Project Budgeting

When your business is not on the right track, there is likely to be a lot of guesswork, resulting in increased pricing for your projects. You have to walk a tightrope between pricing competitively to get customers and earning enough to keep your business profitable. It's a balancing act that many companies never manage.

Effortless Evaluation

When employees are integrated into the productivity tools, managers can effortlessly track their team's mistakes. Not only are errors highlighted, but you can correct them instantly at the right time.

Besides, it helps employers review all workers in real-time, improves the quality of work, and facilitates a successful project.

Helps in Developing a Strong relationship

Knowing how employees are performing and communicating with them to improve their job skills will enable managers to develop a strong relationship with employees.

However, managers can have a straight talk to highlight and correct mistakes quickly. It makes employees satisfied with the organization and inspires them to continue to be efficient in their work.

Conclusion

Most companies are not thinking about all of these benefits when they start looking for a time tracking solution. What they don't realize is that they're not just solving that individual problem, but by using it, they're monitoring their entire business.

Time tracking allows professionals to make smarter decisions about giving quality in less pricing and executing projects, schedule your team for particular tasks, and even spend your day, which can be profitable for the organization.

So, Which is a time tracking Software Will Be Suitable for Your Business?

Workstatus is the fastest-growing time-tracking and management software. This software is ideal and secure for GPS tracking, time-tracking, and many other features associated within.

Features:
● Time tracker
● employee monitoring tool
● project budgeting
● detailed reporting
● online timesheets
● productivity measurement
● employee scheduling.
Tips: Must choose your time tracking software after trying its Free version

16 Life Saving Benefits of Mobile Invoicing that You Cannot Dare to Miss

Harshita Joshi — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 06:37:53 +0000

As a businessman, you must be aware of the bitter fact that making bills and sending them to your clients/customers is not less than a headache.

From your accountants to all employees working on a particular project bear the responsibility of making bills and sending them. Furthermore, late invoice preparation means receiving late payments from your clients.

In simple words, late invoicing causes late payments, and late payments are detrimental to your cash flow.

So, how to cope with this invoicing issue?

The best way to tackle this billing issue is to move towards mobile invoicing for faster bill generation and your business growth.

What is mobile invoicing and how can it benefit your business?

Mobile invoicing for business is the method of sending bills to your clients on their mobile phones in an email, which is not only convenient for your business, but also for your customers. It is because as per Statista, 38% of online shoppers think that mobile payments are more efficient in comparison to other payment methods.

Apart from that, there are also countless mobile business invoicing benefits for your business, let’s know them one by one with some reliable stats.

16 Unbelievable Benefits of Mobile Invoicing for Your Business

1. Payments Made and Received Fast

As mentioned above, invoicing delays give birth to late payments, resulting in a poor cash flow. However, an efficient mobile invoicing app can turn this negativity into positivity.

It can quickly send a mobile invoice to your customers, and they can receive that at lightning speed. By means of advanced invoicing apps, businesses can automatically send invoices to their customers when they take services or products from them.

Moreover, you must remember that mobile invoicing makes customers pay you 2 to 3 times faster, according to the research.
In a nutshell, payments made and received faster when banking on mobile billing apps.

2. Saving Money

Paper invoicing devours a great deal of time and a large amount of money (stationery, paper, postage etc).

On the other hand, mobile invoicing and payments not only saves your money spent on stationery, paper, postage, and the like, but it also saves your time, as you can use your fingertips to send the mobile bill to your customers promptly.

Furthermore, it also saves you from duplicate invoices, in which you pay for an invoice more than once. Sometimes, it is done by your vendors intentionally and sometimes by mistake.

According to some study via Concur, preventing duplicate invoices can help you save around $12,000 per month.

If you see any bill on your mobile screen, your system will clearly show you whether it is paid or not, which, in turn, will save you from paying more than once.

3. Billing Process Becomes Standardized

Using modern invoice app for Android or any other platform, you can get your entire billing process standardized, making it more professional-looking.

Most mobile invoicing apps can integrate with a cloud-based system, and you will be able to sync your data across multiple devices for a uniform look without being affected by any place from where you access it.

4. Convenient for Customers to Pay You

As per Statista, 29% of US customers love to pay using their smartphones. It is because they don’t have to come to you carrying cash, cheque, or credit card for payment. They can pay from anywhere by using invoicing apps for Android or iOS whichever they have.

Furthermore, you must take it into account that many famous mobile bill apps like Invoicera, which is a famous Android mobile invoice app comes with 30 payment gateways, which means your customers will have more options to pay and choose one as per their convenience.

You mustn’t forget that the easier is for your customers to pay you, the faster you will be paid.

5. No Extra Charge for Such Comfort

Your customers don’t have to any extra charge for such comfort, as mobile invoice app doesn’t charge. Therefore, paying by means of mobiles has become a trend.

On the contrary, when your customers pay you in cash, they have to come to you sometimes, spending some money, which costs them more.

But, paying by means of mobile invoice apps doesn’t cost them, as they just have to move their fingertips.

6. Alleviates your Accountants’ Burden

Paper billing gets on the nerves of accountants due to going to every employee individually asking for expense details spent on the project they worked on, note such details, prepare rough invoices, check them, correct them, get them approved and send them.

Don’t you think that all this process is not only time consuming, but also patience-consuming? But, mobile invoicing system also provide the solution to this problem. how?

Such apps connect all such employees on a single system platform to know the project expense details, which saves a great deal of time and leaves your accountant more tension-free.

They don’t have to waste time in deciphering confusing writing given by your employees. And, they don’t have to go through every billing paper to know details like which payments are paid, pending or overdue.

Such information can easily be accessed at a single location, the billing app.

7. Automation

Modern billing software for mobile allows you to get your payment reminder automatically set. Having so, you can remind your customers to pay you before the due date by automatically sending them a payment reminder message/mail.

The system automatically generates bills on the basis of transaction records (date, time, the number of products, last payment records, adding late payment charges, deducting price coming from discounts or special offers) fed in it with only a little manual effort.

So, you can be assured about timely payments, which in turn, will allow you to take business risks as per your financial condition for your business prosperity.

8. Easily search a particular invoice and its details

In paper invoicing, you have to quickly find a particular file out of a pile of files, and then you pick the one you want and look for the details by checking each page of the file. Such haste also leads to errors.

However, when you use a mobile bill app, then you just have to enter the customer’s name, which is enough to put all their transaction records before you on the screen.

Having so, your saved time can be invested in something feasible for your business growth.

9. Nature-friendly

According to a study, experts have found that digital invoicing is four times more nature-friendly than paper invoicing. You are removing a huge amount of carbon footprint by using this. It is because you are not using papers and emission-causing vehicles for invoice delivery and receiving payments.

And, taking a stand for the welfare and safety of the environment will put you into the limelight and set you apart from your competitors, as your business does all to save nature, which will also attract nature-loving clients to your business.

10. No need to be always in office

If your business requires travel and meeting away from your office at clients’ workplace, then you can do so by managing your invoicing using your fingers, which means your invoicing process will never stop no matter where you are.

Apart from that, modern technology-powered mobile invoice printers can make it easier for you to print out a hard copy of the bill for the customers asking for this.

11. Get signatures and issues receipts at lightning speed

Using a stylus or finger coming with mobile invoicing software, you can sign or take the signature of your customers when receiving payments from them or when they receive your product or service respectively and issue the receipts in a short while.

Furthermore, you can do so to approve an estimate or authorize a payment. You can send the digital receipt through email to your customers.

Due to this, no matter how far you are from your customers you can do such business-related tasks with them.

12. Create and send professional-looking bills

The best thing about digital invoices is that they can have enthralling images or computerized-items. Such bills not only look more professional, but they also bring a smile on the customer’s face.

It means they will pay you smilingly and take your invoices more seriously due to the bill impact with your company logo or gif animation.

13. A central point for storage

Billing systems of the past used to consume a considerable amount of your local memory. But, now the story is completely different, as you can have your mobile invoices, estimates, and any related or necessary invoicing documents automatically stored in the cloud with more safety.

Having all safely secured in the cloud means that you don’t need to be preoccupied with losing such important information. All you have to do is to use your authorized devices to access such information.

14. More transparency means more trust

A mobile invoicing application not only allows you to know your customer payment details, but it also allows your customers to see all their payment and purchasing details by with their fingertips.

And, the more transparency and awareness of every detail between both of you are, the more you both feel comfortable in trading together.

This increased trust coming from transparency will take your business relations with your clients/customers to your intended level.

15. An air of activeness and creativity in your workplace

Everything, from making bills to receiving payments will go fast, which will bring an air of activeness to your workplace and remove laziness from it.

Apart from that, mobile invoicing will also allow your designers to show their creativity by means of creating designed bills.

In a nutshell, creativity and activeness will become an integral part of your workplace.

16. Be modern and reach out to more customers

When you provide your customers the convenience to pay you with the best mobile invoicing app, then they will consider you modern and caring for them.

Apart from that, 90% of businesses find the mobile billing app the best way to reach out to more customers, as your business will not be affected by where your customers are. They can pay you from anywhere which means customers will choose only your business because of finding you modern.

Let’s Sum Up

This blog acquainted you with the business benefits of mobile billing by giving you 16 unbelievable benefits of mobile invoicing for your business.

No matter what your business is a mobile billing app makes easier for your business to reach out to more customers, allow your customers to pay you conveniently, has a modern and creative atmosphere in your workplace, and so on.

Some reliable stats are mentioned in the write up to ease your understanding and one reliable online invoicing solution for Android is Invoicera allowing your customers to pay you by choosing any payment gateway as per their comfort.

Checkout 6 Basic Steps to Learn Mobile App Development Lifecycle

Harshita Joshi — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 11:44:34 +0000

The software world is always evolving especially mobile app development. Today, there are approx 2.5 billion mobile users around the globe. And, if we look at the market research report, you will see, the app economy will reach 6.3 trillion by 2021.

As the graph shows, there is a bright future for mobile app development. So, if you’ve thought about building a mobile app for business purposes or personal use. It would be good if you have an understanding of the mobile app development lifecycle. Also, you can choose a mobile app development company listed on SoftwareFirms.

But before jumping to the life cycle, let's cover another question that is buzzing over the Internet.

Is it necessary for businesses to have a mobile app?

Well, if you ask me- it is Yes. These days apps are a necessity for a business. This is because it helps in improving customer engagement as well as facilitates brand-building processes.

Moreover, it opens huge opportunities for businesses to grow and earn maximum revenue. To prove this, let see the mobile app statistics in the figure below.

So, while looking at the mobile application stats, I would advise you, grab this opportunity as early as possible. Because if you don't grab it now, you are keeping yourself much back from the existing market.

But before you start developing an app, let me clear you one thing. Mobile app development is not just one step task. You need to follow some steps to generate the desired benefits.

Today, the experience we are feeling with the app is different from the one we used to have in the past. This is only because some developers follow the mobile app development SDLC.

I know, your mind is triggering with a question…

What is the Mobile App Development SDLC? How is It Helpful?

Mobile app development SDLC is nothing but the process that is evolved while developing an app. This Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is similar to a waterfall model. It is derived from studying the various aspects of an app. However, there are countless benefits to it, some are as follow:
● It helps in recalling What's right for your business.
● What platform should you consider?
● At what time will your app develop?
● How will the app look? And much more.

Now, let see what are the mobile application development process steps?

6 Easy Steps: Learn the Mobile App Development Lifecycle

1. Explore Market Research

The first step is easy but at the same time, it's most important. The research phase will help you in discovering new ideas to develop any type of app. Not only the ideas you will get, but there are also other benefits too like recognizing the target audience, what solution you will serve with your app? and a lot more.

Here, in this stage, you will understand:
● What feature do you need to add?
● What will be your target location?
● What feature will differentiate you from others?
● It helps you in selecting the platform- what OS to opt for an app?
● Whether to go for cross-platform, native, or hybrid?

Wooo!!...so much information.

But do you know how to do or what to do in market research?

Well, the answer is simple- go for the competitor research, explore what is on-trend, what features are mostly liked by the audience, etc. Overall, you can Google it to gather all this information while going to develop an app.

2. Design

The design stage decides the look and feels for your app. Here, with a look and feel, I mean your app UI/UX. UI and UX are the two important elements of any app. It helps in determining the success of your app.

What Role Does UI/UX Play in An App?

The UI/UX has a great role to play in the mobile app. UI is a path through which users interact with your app whereas UX provides the experience of using the app. These both are important because when a user opens your app, it is only the design (UI/UX) that can impress them to stay for a longer time.

So, while deciding the design of an app, sketch multiple designs, and ask your colleagues to give feedback. Note down that feedback and do changes in design if required. This is how you can come up with some interesting, unique, and engaging design.

3. Development

This phase of the app development life cycle covers the coding part or you can say the back-end part. This phase gets started after you finalize the app idea. I am saying this because the developer has to develop the prototype to confirm the features and functionalities.

The development stage is split into multiple sections- back-end or server-end, APIs, and the front-end.

In this stage of the cycle, whether you have hired an in-house app developer or outsourcing mobile app development (PixelCrayons), the developer will create an actual screen after writing the codes. This is a screen through which the user will interact with your app. So, make sure your developer has included all those points that we discussed in the above phases.

4. Testing

Testing is important because it gives you the authority to check the quality of your app. It also helps you in deciding which feature is working well or which is showing bugs? That is why- testing is a crucial step in the mobile app development process.

On the other hand, testing shows the defect that your app holds. This shows how you can easily fix those errors in the early stage. The errors are setbacks for your app. This can cause your app not to perform well. Therefore make sure you have a fast speed wireless network router like Netgear router login to communicate effectively with your team members to ensure timely delivery of the product and to avoid miscommunication. Hence, it adds value to your claims and ensures a better experience for the users.

Further, the testing process is distributed in different parts.
● Functionality testing
● Performance testing
● Compatible testing
● Scalability testing
● Usability testing
● Security testing

If you don’t want to lose your potential customer, fix all the technical errors confronted while following the testing step. You can hire a tester to execute this process. Also, make sure your testing team and development team have better coordination at work. Because the testing team will not solve the error, they will only have to inform the development team. It is a developer who can fix all the bugs.

However, there are two ways of testing your app- manual and automation testing. Both of the testing processes are equally important. You should go with both because of the common motive- recognizing the bugs. They are useful in finding all the bugs in your app.

5. Launch/ Deployment

Pick the particular day you want to launch your application in the marketplace. To do such, make a plan, talk with your team, and then deploy your mobile application on the ideal platform. However, launching the application isn't the last step. As you get continuous criticism from your crowd, you need to roll out that criticism and do the improvement accordingly.

That is why we are saying- two other cycles remain related to this stage i.e maintenance and support. Here, maintenance is offering better functionality for your application. Whereas, support help in resolving the queries of your customers’ faces while using the app. Not only that, you can guide users- how to use the app in a better way?

6. Branding/Marketing

The success of a mobile application is wildly dependent on branding. Branding adds value to your app. As there are millions( approx 2.8 million) of apps available to download from the Google Play Store. This means competition is much higher.

So don't ignore the branding of your application to different online platforms. When you brand your app well, Branding not only gives your app visibility but also helps in building strong associations with the users.

Optimize your app and advertise it to the different social media channels. This way your app is reachable to a massive audience. Hence, this will help you in targeting the ideal customer and earn profit in the business.

For this, you can join different groups of your niche and share the app link or even you can create a landing page.

Wrapping Up

If you are willing to build a mobile application, you should know the cycles involved in this entire development process. Here, in this article, we have talked over the six basic stages of mobile app development. These steps guarantee that the result (mobile application) satisfies your desires and fills your business needs.

Additionally, if you are not a technical person but desire to have an app or looking for app development companies in India. Feel free to take help from software development consulting companies like SoftwareFirms. Here, you will get the endless option of the companies in the required categories-whether you are searching for an in-house development team or outsource development team.