Managing time and expenses effectively is crucial for the success and growth of any services organization. If you're still relying on spreadsheets to manage time tracking and project expenses, you’re going to get left behind. Professional Services Automation (PSA) can help you achieve increased efficiency and improved productivity for service teams.
Developed after in-depth discussions with professional service leaders, Rocketlane is a PSA tool designed to take your project management and delivery to the next level. It comes with robust PSA time tracking and financial management capabilities that make project delivery easier, faster, and smarter. Unlike most PSA software with unappealing interfaces that push your users away, Rocketlane brings all your users to one place – and keeps them there. It simplifies every aspect of time tracking and expense management -- two of the most time and effort-intensive areas of project accounting.
With Rocketlane, you can find the right resources, improve billable utilization, and efficiently manage financial expenses for your high-value projects.
Can’t wait to see all this in action? Sign up for a Rocketlane demo.
How Rocketlane PSA makes your time management and expense process efficient and accurate
Here’s how Rocketlane’s PSA capabilities take your time and expense management to the next level:
Enhanced accuracy
No more manual data entry errors and inaccuracies in your time tracking and project budget tracking. Rocketlane PSA's automated resource allocation ensures that your best resources are spending the right amount of time and that your project financials are always precise and up to date.
Increased efficiency
With automated and streamlined workflows, Rocketlane’s PSA capabilities eliminate the need for time-consuming manual tasks, allowing your team to focus on better billable utilization.
Better cost control
Rocketlane’s budget tracking gives you granular visibility into, and better control over expenses and budgets, so you can prevent costly overruns and make informed spending decisions.
Real-time insights
With access to up-to-the-minute information, you can get the insights you need to make data-driven decisions and optimize your processes to achieve better results.
How Rocketlane’s simplifies and streamlines the time management process
How you manage your team’s time inarguably has the biggest impact on your project’s profitability and delivery.
The first step to effective time management is time tracking. It typically involves each employee manually keeping track of their tasks throughout the week and feeding them into a timesheet or a time billing software at the end of the week.
But what you need for effective time management is not time tracking; you need insights into how employees utilize their time so you can improve billable utilization. In other words, you need to know how and where your teams spend their time.
Rocketlane simplifies this process by categorizing various types of work. You can easily identify which work categories, such as meetings, emails, customer calls, etc., consume the majority of your time. This information empowers your team to streamline their efforts and eliminate unnecessary tasks.
Here’s how Rocketlane’s time management features can help you:
Simplified time logging
With Rocketlane, you can submit timesheets, track time spent on project tasks, and even specify non-billable hours to help you understand the impact of non-billable time on overall billable utilization. In just a few clicks, you can even submit time reports directly from the tasks that you work on. For instance, your team members can add time as and when they update their task statuses. With smart suggestions and carryovers, you don’t have to manually track the tasks they were engaged in throughout the week – Rocketlane does this for you. It also integrates with your Google Calendar to automatically log time for all your calendar events.
Data-powered billable utilization goals
Time tracking done accurately can also help you set billable utilization goals for your team. For instance, you could want individual contributors on your team to spend most of their time on billable work. If you find them spending too long on non-billable tasks, it might be time to review your process. Similarly, you’d need a customer account manager to spend most of their time on stakeholder meetings. If you see that they are spending too much of their time on project management, you might need to know when you’re setting goals for them.
Improved benchmarking and forecasting
Using a PSA tool for time tracking empowers you with detailed insights into the time allocation for various tasks and projects. Using this data in your planning process enables you to confidently project the time budget for a project. As a result, you can provide your clients with more accurate estimates regarding project duration and, importantly, the rationale behind those estimates.
While time management ensures efficient allocation of resources, timelines, and tasks to ensure project profitability, expense management complements this effort by ensuring that financial resources are utilized optimally. Financial management of projects is mostly done by using dedicated expense management software.
The benefits of expense management software
Here's how using an expense management system can improve the efficiency and delivery of your projects:
Budget control
Effective financial management allows organizations to establish and maintain control over project budgets, ensuring that expenses align with allocated funds to prevent cost overruns.
Better resource allocation
Effective financial management allows project managers to allocate resources efficiently. Understanding project requirements and financial constraints allows suitable resources to be allocated, reducing the risk of investing in multiple resources and minimizing duplicate resource allocation.
Profitability analysis
Tracking costs, revenue, and time in a centralized location helps in analyzing the financial performance of projects. This facilitates easy evaluation of profits and enables you to make necessary tweaks to your resource and budget allocation.
Risk management
Financial planning provides visibility into areas in the project where resources and budget have been invested, reducing the risk of cost overruns and insufficient funding.
Rocketlane: Your best bet for accurate expense management
Proper expense management is crucial for the growth of your organization and the optimization of your resources. However, doing so can be challenging without the right tools.
Most companies rely on online expense management solutions or web-based expense reporting tools to capture project expenses. But that’s just one part of the financial management of projects.
Rocketlane handles the end-to-end needs of project financial management with a range of powerful features, including:
Rate Cards
Rocketlane’s Rate Cards allow you to create and manage bill rates for various roles or resources. The standardization achieved through rate cards not only guarantees accurate revenue calculations but also simplifies the billing process by eliminating discrepancies in rates.
Cost Rates
With Rocketlane, you can assign cost rates to individual users. These cost rates are instrumental in calculating project costs based on actual resource utilization, and each resource's respective rates. By combining cost rates and resource utilization data in one place, Rocketlane ensures that project budgets remain closely aligned with reality.
Resource management to align costs, rates, and availability
Rocketlane extends its financial capabilities into resource management, enabling organizations to effectively plan and manage project budgets. By seamlessly aligning costs, rates, and resource availability, you can make informed decisions about resource allocation. This integration helps maintain financial prudence while ensuring that projects are adequately staffed and resourced to meet objectives.
Multiple billing types catering to your needs
Not all projects are created equal, and neither should their billing methods be. Rocketlane offers flexibility in choosing the billing method that best suits your project's needs:
1. Fixed fee
This billing type is ideal for projects with a predetermined scope and size. In such cases, project costs are established in advance and agreed upon with your client.
2. Time and material
For projects where flexibility is critical, it makes sense to use an approach that allows you to charge clients based on the actual time and material spent on the project.
Rocketlane also allows you to categorize tasks as nonbillable, ensuring transparency in cost allocation.
Project financial reporting
With this capability, you get real-time monitoring of budget usage and a view of planned versus actual revenue, cost, and profitability at the project level. Armed with this data, you can make data-driven decisions to ensure sustained project financial health.
Portfolio reports
This feature allows you to track and understand revenue recognition effectively across your project portfolio for your Fixed Fee and Time and Material projects. These reports facilitate accurate revenue forecasting, ensure compliance with accounting standards, and aid in financial planning and analysis.
Experience the best in time and expense tracking with Rocketlane
If you're still grappling with spreadsheet-based time tracking and expense management, it's time to move to the fast lane with Rocketlane.
Rocketlane is your ultimate PSA solution that streamlines project management and simplifies time tracking and expense management for stress-free project accounting. Here’s a quick summary of Rocketlane’s standout time and expense management capabilities:
Time tracking
Capture real-time insights with Rocketlane's time-tracking capabilities. Monitor project progress, analyze resource utilization, and adjust on the fly for improved efficiency.
Resource management
Rocketlane's resource management ensures efficient project budgets and resource alignment, for every project you work on.
Flexible billing
Tailor billing to your project's requirements, whether you use a fixed fee approach or a time-and-material-based one.
Standardized financial processes
Standardize billing for precise revenue calculations and project cost assessments.
Financial reporting
Gain real-time visibility into project finances, including budget usage, planned versus actual revenue, and profitability.
Portfolio reports
Track revenue recognition across your project portfolio for accurate forecasting and strategic financial planning.
Try Rocketlane for free and experience all this for yourself.
FAQs on time and expense management software
1. What is a time and expense system?
A time and expense system is a software solution designed to help organizations efficiently
- Track and manage the time spent by employees on various tasks and projects, and
- Capture and process expenses related to business activities.
These systems are critical for accurate billing, budgeting, and financial management in service companies.
2. Which is the best software to track billable hours?
The best software to track billable hours can vary depending on your specific needs and preferences.
Rocketlane has been designed to be the go-to PSA solution for service companies of all sizes and stages of maturity. Its user-friendly interface, automated workflows, and robust time-tracking capabilities make it an easy choice for any company looking to track and improve its billable utilization.
3. What is time and expense capture?
Time and expense capture refers to the process of collecting/recording data related to the time spent on tasks and the expenses incurred during business activities. This data is crucial for accurate billing, cost control, and financial reporting.
4. What is time and expense entry?
Time and expense entry involves recording/documenting the hours worked by employees on various tasks or projects and the expenses they incur. This data is typically entered into a software system for tracking, reporting, and analysis. Accurate time and expense entry are essential for billing clients, managing budgets, and ensuring compliance.
5. How do you automate an expense report?
Automating an expense report involves using software or tools to streamline the process of capturing, categorizing, and submitting expenses. Here are the typical steps:
- Expense capture: Use a mobile app or software to capture receipts and expenses digitally. Many apps allow you to photograph receipts, which are then automatically digitized.
- Categorization: The software should provide options for categorizing expenses, such as meals, travel, or office supplies. Some apps use AI to auto-categorize expenses based on merchant names.
- Receipts or documentation: Attach digital copies of receipts to corresponding expenses for verification and compliance purposes.
- Approval workflow: Implement an approval workflow within the software, where expenses are routed to approvers based on predefined rules and limits.
- Expense report generation: The software should generate detailed expense reports automatically, compiling all approved expenses.
6. What is the simplest time-tracking app?
The simplest time-tracking app can vary based on individual preferences, but we highly recommend Rocketlane for its seamless interface and ease of use.
7. Which is the simplest time and expense tracker for professional service teams?
If you currently use different apps for time and expense reporting, you’re making things harder than they need to be.
Rocketlane combines the best features of project management tools, expense software, as well as time tracking and invoice software to make project delivery a breeze.
Sign up for a Rocketlane demo and experience this for yourself.
