Your Time is Your Product - Track and Bill Accordingly

Feb. 13, 2013 - PRLog -- If you do not accurately track and bill your time, you could be missing out on a lot of income. One of the biggest reasons for lost wages amongst freelancers and those who must log their hours to be paid is lack of adequate time tracking. Why would someone not track for billable hours? Well, one of the most common reasons is simply that they forget.

When you work at home, there are many distractions to deal with and they occur on a daily basis. You may be trying to balance work, home, and other responsibilities and when it comes time to log your hours on a project, you "guesstimate" how much time you actually spent working on it. Work time is billable time but if you're not clearly separating time spent on a particular project with all the other things you are doing in your day, you may be missing out on billable hours and short-changing yourself.

Another problem is that when you're new at working for yourself, you may not realize just how much time you really do put into your job. It could be a lot more than you think, which means that you could be losing a lot of income simply because you are not tracking your time properly.

Your Time is Your Product
Are you valuing yours correctly? If not, you're basically giving your product/time away for free. At the end of the day, you deserve to get paid for all the time you spent working. You wouldn't think about going to an office or any other company and work an 8 hour shift only to be paid for 5 hours but that is essentially what you are doing if you don't track your time and bill accordingly.

If you sold a line of clothing, you wouldn't give your product away for free. You would expect to get paid for each item that you send to a customer, so don't give your precious time away for free by letting distractions or anything else keep you from billing for all the time you actually spend working. The simple solution to this very common problem is to monitor and track your time. This way, you know exactly how much time you put into your work and you can get paid what you deserve.

Sell Your Value
In addition to clocking your time, you also need to sell your value. If you do work in 8 hours that another professional can do in 3 with the same quality, are you really a value to the employer? Tracking all of your work hours is important but you don't want to drag on and do the project slowly just to get more clockable hours.

Also, while time = money, you also need to be providing a value for that time that is quantifiable, meaning it can be tracked or proven in some way. If your time spent working is not creating something of value equal to the price of your time, why would your employer continue to pay you for it?

So don't just sell your time; sell your value for that time. Prove that you are worth it to your employer or client. If you have concerns about how to do this, there are tools available to help you.

Help with Time Tracking
Worksnaps is a tool designed to help you track your time so you don't lose out on income simply because you forgot to log your hours. This tool gives you an accurate account of the time you spend working. This way, you can bill according so you can get paid for all of your time, not just some of it. It's also a great way to hold yourself (or your employees) accountable for time spent on a project. You can see how much time is actually spent working on a project and what results come from that time. It helps you to literally add a value to your time.

From: http://worksnaps.net