Set Clear Goals and Organise Your Projects

In an earlier post, we explored how time tracking can uncover the real costs behind offering freebies during sales—a surprising insight into how “free” can sometimes cost more than expected! Today, let’s dive deeper into making time tracking work even better for your business. By defining your goals and setting up a smart way to categorise your projects, you’ll turn time-tracking data into a tool for making confident, data-driven decisions. Throughout this blog I will refer to Hive as the tool of choice, these subjects will apply to any other tool you pick though. 

 Define Your Time-Tracking Goals

Before jumping into the details, think about what you actually want to achieve with time tracking. Different businesses have different goals, and knowing yours ensures that you’re collecting data that matters. Here are some common goals and how they might apply:

Accurate Client Billing

If your business charges by the hour or by project, time tracking is essential to make sure you’re billing clients fairly and accurately. When you’ve got solid records, you can show clients exactly where their money is going and ensure you’re paid for every minute spent. If you rather not share all the granular details with clients you can just use the data internally and have the back up of the data should a client ask for it. Over time, this can help you refine future estimates and make sure you’re not undervaluing your work.

Internal Productivity Insights

For internal teams, time tracking can give you a clear view of where your team’s time is going and whether it’s being used efficiently. You might discover that certain tasks are taking longer than expected—insights that can help you improve your processes, give your team the right support, or even automate repetitive tasks.

Project Cost / Cost of Service Analysis

Tracking time helps reveal the real cost behind each project or service. For instance, a digital marketing agency tracking campaign time for different clients may notice that certain clients require more hours than others. With this data, they could consider adjusting future pricing or negotiating higher rates to keep things profitable.

Setting Up Categories and Projects

Once you know your goals, it’s time to organise your time-tracking system to make the data as useful as possible. Setting up categories makes reports more insightful, helping you see where to focus your resources or make pricing tweaks.

Client/Project

Organising time by client or project gives you an easy way to manage billing and reporting. It’s super helpful to know exactly how much time each client’s project is taking, and it also makes it simple to share clear, itemised breakdowns when clients ask for details.

Task Type

Break down your time entries by type of task to get a real sense of where your efforts go. You might use categories like design, coding, client meetings, marketing, or admin tasks. If you find, for example, that a big chunk of time goes to client meetings, it could be a sign that you need to set some boundaries or consider shorter, more focused meetings.

Billable vs. Non-Billable Hours

Separating billable client work from non-billable internal tasks is key. Non-billable hours include activities like admin, training, or internal planning sessions. These are important but don’t directly bring in revenue. By tracking both, you’ll get a clearer picture of how much time goes to revenue-generating work versus necessary internal tasks.

You might decide you only want to track billable time and tell staff to only track client work time. This can be a good entry point into time tracking if your company or team culture is new to time tracking and not fully onboard with the idea of whole time tracking. 

Making all this happen in Hive

Time tracking or time sheets 

In Hive when it comes to time tracking you have the option of allowing timesheets or just tracking time against the relevant action. 

If you’re going to just be tracking client time and not their whole time I’d suggest you just use the time tracking feature rather than timesheets. 

Doing it like this keeps it simple and doesn’t require approvals etc. 

However if you want to know what the whole time per staff member is being spent on then timesheets are the way to go. 

Timesheets will be prompted and need to be completed. By default all timesheets are routed to project owners. If you rather it go to managers only each user will need to be assigned a manager who approved the timesheet at the end of the week (or your preferred day) This assigning of a manager will need to be done per user so it’s something to consider in your new starter onboarding. 

Setting up your categories and leave types

In Hive you will need to navigate to the Time module to set up your categories and leave types. Think about all the types you need;

Then we can move on to your categories, below are some examples. You can get as detailed as you want. 

• Admin
• Reporting
• Content
• Design
• Build

Adding staff costs for better reporting

Ever employee costs you a different amount; so Hive has the ability to populate that rate into the system so you have a one stop shop for your reporting with time and resourcing. 

You can add this Bill Rate against the staff member easily; 

Back to buy in

When working with employees or team members that have some resistance to tracking their time it is so important to make them part of the change. Time tracking isn’t something that should be put in overnight with no consultation or collaboration. Doing that can really foster the fear of “big brother is watching you” and can undermine your entire work piece. 

I suggest you have a small working group from each department involved; explain the importance and what you’re trying to accomplish with tracking time. Allow them to have their say and help with coming up with the rules and the categories. They can act as the champions of the change and make such a difference to the ease of embedding the new way of working. What’s even better is if you convert and have one of the biggest anti-tracking staff members as part of that group!

In the end, time tracking isn’t just about keeping a log—it’s a way to see the full value of the work you and your team do. The more organised and goal-focused your time tracking is, the more it can help you make smarter, more strategic choices for your business’s growth.

Here’s a link if you want to trial Hive