Writing hours: the easy way to keep track of your hours worked

What is writing hours?

Writing hours means that employees record how much time they have spent on specific work. For example, you can write hours against a project, order, customer, task or activity.

Suppose an employee works eight hours. They spend three hours on project A, four on project B and one hour on internal work. By recording these hours, it becomes clear how the available time was actually spent.

Writing hours is therefore also referred to as recording hours, writing time, recording time or keeping track of hours worked.

Why is writing hours important?

Accurate time tracking tells you more than just how many hours someone has worked. It provides insight into how time is spent within your organisation.

This is useful, for example, to:

• invoice hours worked correctly;
• monitor project progress and costs;
• compare planned hours with actual hours spent;
• plan future work more realistically;
• gain insight into available capacity.

The comparison between planned and recorded hours is particularly interesting. For example, was five hours planned for an activity, but an employee ultimately records seven hours? Then you know there is a difference between the planning and what happens in practice.

By regularly analysing these differences, you can plan future work more accurately.

How can you write hours?

There are several ways to keep track of hours worked. Which method works best depends on your organisation and the type of work.

Writing hours in Excel

For small teams, writing hours in Excel can be a simple solution. For example, employees enter which project they worked on each day and how many hours they spent on it.

As an organisation grows, this can become cumbersome. Files need to be maintained, data checked and information sometimes manually transferred to other systems.

Recording hours with a timer

With a timer, you record time while you work. You start the timer when you begin a task and stop it as soon as you finish. This means you do not have to work out afterwards exactly how much time you spent on an activity.

Writing hours with software or an app

With time tracking software, employees can keep track of their hours digitally. This can be done manually, with a timer or via a time tracking app.

For employees who work on the road, on site or on the shop floor, mobile time tracking can be useful. They can record their hours straight away instead of having to reconstruct what they did at the end of the week.

Writing hours per project

For project-based organisations, simply knowing the total number of hours worked is usually not enough. You also want to know what those hours were spent on.

By writing hours against a project, order or activity, you gain insight into how much time work actually takes. You can then compare the planned hours with the recorded hours.

Suppose you have planned 100 hours for a project and employees have already recorded 80 hours, while the project is only halfway complete. You can then investigate the cause of the difference at an early stage and make adjustments if necessary.

Keeping track of project hours therefore not only helps with post-calculation, but also while the work is being carried out.

How does writing hours with vPlan work?

With vPlan, you combine planning and time tracking. Employees can record time against the activities they are working on, either manually or with a timer. Employees can also keep track of their hours via the vPlan app.

Because time tracking is linked to the planning, you can compare planned time with the time actually spent. This means you can see not only how many hours have been recorded, but also whether work takes more or less time than originally expected.

In the time tracking dashboard, you can then gain insight into recorded and planned time and further analyse recorded hours. This makes writing hours more than a separate administrative task; it becomes part of your daily planning.

Want to combine time tracking and planning? Discover the possibilities of time tracking with vPlan.