Employer branding: Higher employer attractiveness through modern tools

In times of a cross-sectoral shortage of skilled workers, employer attractiveness plays a central role. Skilled workers are currently generally in the fortunate situation of being able to choose from a multitude of job offers. For employers, this means that they can only hold their own in the "war for talents" if they successfully assert themselves against the competition - which is usually only a mouse click away on the job portal. As current surveys confirm, when assessing the attractiveness of an employer, most employees today are no longer only concerned with a crisis-proof job and an attractive salary, but also with a modern digital working environment equipped with modern technology that supports them as optimally as possible in their work.

Time recording in project-oriented companies: A necessary but annoying evil

This is especially true for work that employees tend to regard as a "necessary but annoying evil". A good example, especially in sectors with project business such as management consultancy, the IT sector or advertising agencies, is time recording. Unlike in other industries, employees usually work on different projects during their working hours and have to record these working hours as precisely and promptly as possible and assign them to the corresponding projects. Only then can they be billed precisely and promptly.

In many companies, time recording is still done on classic Excel lists, which are usually filled in once a week and then forwarded to the project management and/or the accounting department for accounting. There, the data is then checked and, if necessary, settled.

The larger the project volume and the greater the number of project participants, the greater the effort required to create, compare and process the project times. After all, all the data from the various Excel lists must be transferred to the corresponding invoicing software.

The fact that this does not always go smoothly is confirmed, for example, by Elmar Weber, Chief Financial Officer at EXTEDOa leading provider of software solutions and consulting services for the authorisation of medicines, medical devices and pesticides: "The aggregation of the numerous documents at the end of the month in order to create the invoices proved to be very time-consuming and error-prone.

Also with Infocient Consulting, a certified SAP partner with a focus on business intelligence, the continuous project growth meant that the combination of Excel lists and invoicing software originally chosen for time recording and invoicing eventually reached its limits. Jochen Weintz, founder and managing director of Infocient Consulting, recalls: "The previous largely manual workflow for time recording and invoicing proved to be no longer feasible against the backdrop of an ever-increasing project volume and an ever-increasing number of employees. Soon it 'felt' like it was costing us a whole day just to gather the documents required for accounting."

The two examples impressively underline the fact that the manual recording, collation, checking and accounting of project times is anything but attractive for the employees responsible for it and thus certainly does not lead to a higher attractiveness as an employer for the respective companies.

Time recording and accounting with modern online tools

Cloud-based software solutions such as ZEP - Time Recording for Projects help to make the process of time recording and accounting more efficient, simpler and thus more attractive for employees, especially in project-oriented companies. Instead of having to enter their times manually in Excel lists, the project participants record them simply and quickly via a web-based user interface: on the PC, on the laptop or on the smartphone via the corresponding app. The employees responsible for accounting can access this time data in parallel, which is already linked to the corresponding projects in the software. This completely eliminates the need for manual allocation. And invoicing is also done at the touch of a button. The data is simply transferred to the additional module Invoice, and the corresponding invoices are created and sent directly from the module.

Modern IT technology: Important prerequisite for higher employer attractiveness

So when it comes to finding and retaining skilled workers today, companies should do everything they can to provide these skilled workers with a modern, efficient working environment that especially helps to make tedious routine tasks as efficient and user-friendly as possible. In project-oriented industries, this is especially true for time recording and billing. Web-based online tools like ZEP make an essential contribution to this.

You can find further examples of the use of ZEP in practice at our Field reports.