When you have several different remote employees all over the world, it can be difficult to manage schedules and keep track of time for everyone on your team.
It can also be difficult to make sure everyone gets paid correctly for the time they worked, at the right time, and in the right currency.
Without the right tools, time keeping and invoicing are hard to manage.
Thankfully, with several advancements in time tracking and invoicing technology, it’s a lot easier than it used to be to manage the scheduling, employee monitoring, and paying of employees in different locations in the correct currency.
This article will present a list of top tools you need to help you with time keeping and invoicing as well as a quick review of how those tools work.
Introducing Time Doctor
If you’re looking to monitor remote employees or improve the productivity of your firm, then it’s time to learn about Time Doctor. Time Doctor, at its core, is a time tracking app, but it also has several other features that will help you monitor your employees and increase productivity of your employees over time. Let’s talk about the features of Time Doctor and how it can help you.
Time tracking
It would be crazy to talk about Time Doctor without first talking about its best feature—time tracking.
Time Doctor easily tracks the time worked by everyone on your team, no matter where their location is. When one of your team members logs into their Time Doctor account, the software will track their work hours.
The software also gives you a breakdown by client, project, and task.
This helps you identify time spent working and time wasted. When you are able to identify inefficiencies, you can easily make a plan to help your employees work harder and more effectively.
Time Doctor’s time tracking technology will help you find the projects and tasks that are occupying most of your team’s time and help you make adjustments.
Not only does the time tracking feature help you identify inefficiencies, but it helps you with one of the most important tasks: paying employees for the hours they worked and only the hours they worked.
You can rely on the time tracking technology from Time Doctor to be accurate to the second.
Screen monitoring
Another helpful feature of Time Doctor, and where this technology really shines as opposed to competitors, is with the screen monitoring feature.
Some time tracking technologies will track time based on an employee starting and stopping a time, and that’s it. While this is helpful in a number of ways, it’s also not completely reliable when it comes to making sure your employees are staying on tasks.
That’s why Time Doctor has built in a screen monitoring feature. Time Doctor takes screenshots of employee monitors at whatever time interval you specify. This feature can also be turned off if it holds no appeal to you.
You can easily monitor exactly what your team is doing and how they are accomplishing tasks. This helps you identify any distractions, inefficiencies, and wasted time.
Since Time Doctor respects privacy, screenshots are only taken when team members indicate that they are working. This helps eliminate any privacy concerns.
Screen monitoring is the perfect way to see what your employees are doing and how efficiently they are working when they indicate they are working.
Web & app usage monitoring
Part of working efficiently and in order to assign tasks correctly, it’s important to know how employees are using their time. In other words, it’s good to know what specific programs and apps employees are using at different times of the day. Time Doctor tracks this for you.
This type of time tracking helps your firm in a few important ways. First, it helps you see what tasks are taking your employees the longest and what apps they are using to complete different tasks. When you know how much time specific apps take up, you can better understand how much time to allocate to a specific project.
It also helps you understand which apps are being underutilized. For example, your company may be paying top dollar for an app only to find out hardly any of your employees use the app to complete work. Identifying apps you don’t use can save you hundreds to thousands of dollars.
Along the same lines, you may notice your employees are spending a lot of time in a specific app on tasks that could be completed more effectively in another app. With a little bit of redirection, you can help your employees work much more efficiently and get more done in working hours.
Additionally, you can see how your employees are using the app when you monitor their behaviors. This will show you whether or not your employees need additional training on how to use certain apps.
Time tracking isn’t just about logging hours; it’s about tracking tools and apps to see how employees are working and identifying ways they can work more efficiently.
Integrations
Since Time Doctor is all about improving efficiencies at work, they software also integrates with all the top productivity apps.
It would be difficult to save time at work if your employees had to switch between several different software programs to complete work. That’s why Time Doctor integrates with all leading project management tools.
Some of the top integrations include JIRA, Asana, Bitrix24, Trello, GitHub, Basecamp, Slack, Salesforce, Teamwork.com, Todoist, Podio, QuickBooks, Freshdesk, Redmine, Google Apps, Zoho, Yammer, and more.
When selecting a top time management tool, make sure to opt for one that integrates with the top project management tools that you use to organize your projects and tasks.
Reporting
It’s difficult to improve productivity at a company without accurate and automated reporting functionality.
Time Doctor makes reporting a priority. Managers of remote employees can set up automated reports that tells them about hours worked, websites and apps used, tasks and client breakdowns and more. Managers can also receive these reports daily and weekly.
These insights allow you to identify productivity weaknesses and make improvements.
For example, if you notice a certain task is taking too much time away from one of your employees and they aren’t able to get to other tasks, you can assign another person to help out. Additionally, if you notice an employee is spending too much time on unapproved apps, you can help correct time wasting behavior.
Reports are the perfect way to quickly see how your employees are spending time and where adjustments should be made.
Also, check out this country-specific productivity benchmarking tool for a glimpse at how your team is performing.
Invoicing & payroll
Not only does Time Doctor help you keep track of time, but you can also handle invoicing and payroll from within Time Doctor.
Time Doctor integrates with FreshBooks, Payroll Hero, QuickBooks, Teamwork Projects, and WorkflowMAX.
With Time Doctor, you can automatically calculate payroll, based on fixed salaries or hours tracked. You can manage client payroll down to the minute.
You can also manage client billing within Time Doctor. This helps ensure you get paid on time by all of your clients, and keeps your billing in one convenient location.
Summary
If you are looking to increase productivity in measurable ways at your company through accurate time tracking, then it’s time to look into Time Doctor.
Time Doctor is unique in that it tracks in real time, it reminds you to track time, it automatically stops tracking when someone leaves the computer, it has multiple methods to confirm if the time tracked was real work, it doesn’t allow employees to double book work, and it’s easy to set up. In fact, the initial setup of Time Doctor will only take around 10 minutes for admins, and 3-5 minutes for the users of the software. Then, you’ll be officially ready to roll.
Getting currencies right with Wise (formerly TransferWise)
Now that you have been introduced to the top time tracking app, let’s talk about invoicing and payroll.
We have already talked about some of the top tools for invoicing and payroll with Time Doctor’s top integrations. These include FreshBooks, Payroll Hero, QuickBooks, Teamwork Projects, and WorkflowMAX.
Most firms use one of these top payroll platforms already, and this integration keeps time tracking, payroll, and invoicing easy for everyone.
However, companies that hire workers all over the globe need a solution for transfering money in different currencies and being able to get the best exchange rates every time.
For this, Wise (formerly Transferwise) is an excellent tool. Not to mention, it integrates with Time Doctor. Let’s talk about how Wise works and will help you pay all of your employees across the globe accurately.
How does Wise work?
Wise will also show you currency rates links that are posted on XE, Google, and Yahoo right on their website for your reference. This helps you rest assured you are getting the right exchange rate.
Once the exchange has taken place, Wise then makes a local transfer to the person you wired the money to on the other side.
It’s important to note that Wise will take a small percentage of the transaction as their fee. However, this saves you money, because you don’t have to pay a credit card processing fee or bank transaction fees. These types of fees are often much larger and can total up to 5% in hidden fees. Wise is said to be 8x cheaper than banks, which is another reason to use Wise.
How do you set up a business profile?
You can easily set up set up a business profile with Wise and you will need to link your business bank account to make business transactions.
To start a business profile, you need to submit some basic information, go through a verification process to make sure you are who you say you are, and then they will set up your account.
As soon as your business profile is set up, you can start transferring money to employees from your business account.
If you choose to use Wise as your currency converter and Time Doctor as your time tracking app, you’ll be please to know you can easily set up the integration so they work together. For instructions on how to do this, please check out how to set up the integration here.
Where does Wise (formerly TransferWise) send money?
Before committing to a particular currency converter, it’s important to know where you can send money and where employees can receive money.
Thankfully, Wise offers a comprehensive list of currencies. You can send and receive money in currencies from the AUD – Australian Dollar to the USD and almost everything in between.
Since the list is so comprehensive, it’s best to check out the list of coverage directly on the Wise website.
How does Wise (formerly TransferWise) send payroll?
Wise is helpful because it can be used by freelancers as well as businesses.
Freelancers can easily get paid with no fees, work in multiple currencies, and send money abroad. This service is especially cool if you’re looking to avoid fees that companies like PayPal charge freelancers. If you work in USD, Euros, or Australian dollars, you can bypass fees with Wise.
Businesses can also run payroll through the batch payroll tool. The powerful batch payments tool runs international payroll the way they send all payments. In other words, they use the real exchange rate and don’t have any hidden fees. Instead, you pay the one fee they tell you about from the get-go.
Summary
Invoicing a payroll within the same country is as easy as using one of the top invoicing software tools. However, when it comes to paying out invoices in various currencies, you need a top tool like Wise. Wise, formerly TransferWise is preferred by many freelancers and businesses, because of their low and transparent fees.
Wrap up
For companies looking to manage remote teams, it’s important to have the right tools for time tracking and payroll. The combination of Time Doctor and Wise is the perfect way to track time accurately and pay remote employees in the right currencies.
