Why time tracking is essential for a janitorial business

Timeliness is next to godliness when it comes to the commercial cleaning business. An on-time janitorial company shows professionalism, exceptional service, and reliable employees.

When a janitorial company isn’t timely, customers question the quality of their work, their performance history, and if their business is truly worth their purchasing decisions. 

Accurate timekeeping is a measure of the efficacy of your organization

But being efficient isn’t just an external aspect of your business. Sure, customers need to see how timely you are, but if you’re not optimizing time throughout every aspect of your business, then you’re wasting your own value. 

Time tracking is a huge aspect of how businesses analyze and optimize their operations to ensure time is spent in the most valuable areas of each person’s role.

It can seem like a tedious addition to a long list of day-to-day duties, but without the kind of insights time tracking provides, it would be impossible to evolve to the next growth stage.

Why is time tracking essential for a janitorial business?

Time tracking is essential for a janitorial business because it ensures employees work efficiently, recording time spent on each job and generating accurate billing information.

It also ensures employees are paid fairly and accurately and provides an audit trail for any discrepancies in payroll.

Additionally, time tracking can identify areas where improvements can be made in productivity. It can also improve customer service by increasing accuracy in how long a job will take.

What is time tracking?  

Time tracking is the real-time monitoring and evaluation of how long each task takes to complete.

This process provides insight into how your workforce spends their day, the duties they spend the most time on, and where they may be wasting time. 

Tracking is excellent for:

• Keeping employees accountable 

• Accurately monitoring payrolls 

• Evaluating performance 

• Pinpointing time-wasting tasks 

• Providing clients with correct estimates 

• And knowing where most of your business is spending resources

All of these outcomes can provide your business with huge opportunities to fuel growth and increase your work's productivity, profitability, and quality.

Precise tracking of time goes far beyond a simple time card. It generates detailed, accurate data about how employees spend their time. Without these insights, you’ll struggle to evolve into a higher-standing business.

Let’s discuss how.

Staying on top of employee accountability 

When gathering time-allocation data, businesses typically experience the most resistance from their employees. To them, it can feel like they’re being micromanaged, and their contributions to the company are reduced to entries on a time clock.

→ Employee pushback shouldn’t be why you neglect to invest in the process.

Janitorial time-tracking isn’t about a lack of trust between business owners and employees. It’s about ensuring they spend their time on high-value tasks rather than being weighed down by mundane operations.

Time analysis is a partnership between leadership and team members

When proposing time analysis to your workforce, pitch it as a collaborative process to improve workflows. If employees accurately track their time, then leadership can evaluate how they spend the workday and optimize employee schedules to focus on the strengths of their jobs. 

Mobile time tracking also allows you to boost the performance of your workforce by ensuring you’re keeping everyone on time and moving. The collective increase in productivity will lift the weight off your crew and help them perform as an aligned unit. 

If implemented correctly, you’ll see more efficiencies in your teams, establish greater trust at work sites, and be able to book more jobs throughout their schedules.

Tracking time streamlines the payroll process

Another way to increase employee engagement with time tracking is to ensure they understand the benefits to payroll that proper monitoring can provide.

More accurate time accounts of everyone's day-to-day will allow your payroll team to manage everyone's payments with greater precision. 

With proper tracking, the margin of error in time-based payments decreases. You’ll see if employees are overworked and underworked, improving labor costs by eliminating unnecessary overtime and optimizing team distribution. 

An accurate time tracker simplifies customer billing

Your employees' time on the job affects payment accuracy internally and externally.

Time is money, which means time spent on jobs cuts into your bottom line, and accurate data is essential for customer billing.

→ Even if you don’t charge customers hourly for cleaning services, time spent on each service affects your monthly revenue. 

Historical time allocation data can help you establish how much each service costs to finish. Beyond that, you’ll better understand how costly it is when cleaning crews go over the allocated time for a job and how much overtime you have before a service costs you money. 

With accurate tracking, you can bill each cleaning job at an appropriate rate, and there’s no discrepancy between payments. 

Time-tracking tools aid in allocating resources

Payroll and billing are just two ways improved timesheets can affect resource management. Beyond ensuring payments are more accurate, time tracking allows you to understand where you're sinking the most resources, such as:

• Labor hours

• Equipment usage

• Equipment maintenance and repair

• And more

Imagine uncovering how much of your team’s time is spent in travel only to realize they’ve been taking a route that adds 15 extra minutes to their arrival time.

Or seeing discrepancies between how long team members spend on specific tasks, indicating their skills aren’t well suited for their current role.

→ Discover how much of your staff’s time is spent on tedious operational management rather than on their hired-for specialties. 

Track time to ensure every aspect of your business is running optimally

Pinpointing where time is overspent or misused is critical to optimizing your organization's functions.

You want to keep every aspect of your business operating at its full potential. This means:

• Empowering employees to focus on their strengths

• Organizing equipment usage to minimize downtime or upkeep

• Pivoting process as needed keeps things constantly flowing from one task to another. 

Track work hours to measure employee performance

Time management is crucial to performance. Spending too much or too little time on certain tasks can harm the quality of work or reduce revenue.

At a certain point, resource allocation may not even solve the problem of quality of work. This is why tracking your operations is so valuable to how you measure your performance. 

Ensure team members are delivering value at the job site

You don’t want your organization wasting time on tasks that don’t provide high value. Spending too much on-site time completing menial tasks, such as emptying cubicle trash cans or cleaning break-room refrigerators, affects the time available for higher-priority cleaning tasks, such as floor maintenance.

→ Precise data about the profitability and labor of every service may lead you to eliminate time-consuming low-profit services. 

Use time-tracker data to drive management decisions toward greater revenue potential

Discrepancies in employee completion times may also be a red flag in performance tracking. If some teams are slower than others at similar tasks, they may need more training, or the unit may need a leadership shake-up.

This is why time-tracking can also play a significant role in employee reviews and identifying which services are enabling growth for the company.

Use historical employee hours to create more accurate job estimates

From performance monitoring to employee productivity, time tracking gives you a fuller picture of what it takes and, more important, what it costs to perform your services. This library of insights that time-tracking provides enables businesses to better estimate the cost of their services.

If you can provide estimates down to these minute details, you’ll not only be able to win over new customers easier, but your thoroughness will help in the long run with building the relationship. More precise and accurate estimates will allow you to be leaner with your pricing and help you stand out against competitors. 

To get exact estimates, consider these strategies with your time tracking:

• Track all tasks encompassed in your offerings

• Choose an extended length of time to track your services for more accurate averages

• Set a standard of excellence based on your top-performing times

• Extend your tracking into seasonal shifts to see how new work cycles affect your results

Communicate the importance of accurate time recording for project management

Securing an organization-wide buy-in is the biggest challenge of any time-tracking initiative. If your teams don’t use time-tracking software correctly and don’t feel accountable for recording honest data, you’ll get mixed or, worse, tainted results.

Highlight the benefits of adopting a time-tracking solution for the company

When you introduce a time-tracking app to your teams, how you present it can significantly affect whether it’s universally adopted. The proper implementation can prevent management from assuming a role of constant reinforcement. Strategies for encouraging accountability include:

• Pitching the initiative on the previously discussed benefits, such as streamlined payroll and eliminating mundane tasks.

• Use your leadership team or HR department to help motivate employees to be accountable for their time.

• Develop a reward system for proper time management, such as reviews or promotions.

Remember, no one wants to buy into a time-tracking system that adds more time to an already stacked workload.

The right time-tracking solution makes it easy for employees to stay accountable for their workday

The business software you use to track employee time has a major impact on successful implementation and accurate data.

You should invest in cloud-based janitorial software that enables employees to clock in from anywhere—with geofencing to attach GPS locations to timesheets—and even automates some of the work. 

The right tool will set up some framework for time management, where employees simply have to select a section to update times on specific tasks or parts of their days. The time entry framework should include the following:

• Lunch breaks

• Travel time

• Office work

The more structure you provide to employees, the less time they spend recording minutiae in their time tracking.

Aspire simplifies time management with an all-in-one platform for commercial cleaning businesses

When it comes to the right time-management software, you need a few key features: 

• Estimating templates and pricing kits

• Scheduling calendar

• Accounting integrations

• Invoicing capabilities

Aspire’s cloud-based janitorial business software provides these features and more, because we’ve seen how top commercial cleaning companies power their management.

Our expertise enables growth for janitorial businesses at every stage. From time tracking to business management, Aspire is here to help you optimize your entire organization.

Want to experience software designed to help commercial cleaners achieve growth at twice the industry rate? Schedule a commercial cleaning software demonstration with Aspire and see how to take your scheduling efficiencies to the next level.