Project time recording in agencies - more time for creativity

Do you often work on many different projects at the same time in your agency? Then you should manage your time and resources effectively to be successful! Digital project time tracking can help you keep track of everything and increase your productivity. In this blog post, we will take a closer look at project time tracking for agencies and explain why it works with ZEP Professional (almost) at the touch of a button.

Reasons for project time recording in agencies

Every agency works differently - some with many in-house staff, others with freelancers. Large projects, small projects, timely deadlines and important client feedback dominate your everyday life. This makes it all the more important to record your project times accurately and as unbureaucratically as possible, and to manage your projects correctly. After all, you need to record exactly how much time was spent on each project. This is important to ensure that clients are billed correctly and that the actual working time of your team can be invoiced. If you know how much time is needed for a project, you can better plan the budget. You can also better estimate time and resources to ensure you complete the project within budget. A digital project time tracking tool helps you find out which projects take more time than others. With this information, you can optimise processes to work more efficiently and save time and resources. Advantage for your clients: You can offer your clients full transparency and ensure that they are always aware of the progress of projects.

Last, but not least, with project time tracking software you have the possibility to indicate exactly which services were provided and how much time your team spent on them. This can help avoid later discussions about invoices and keep your clients happy. With ZEP Professional, you have a software for project time recording at hand that is no longer in its infancy and with which you fulfil all the requirements for legally compliant time recording.

Helpful modules for project time recording

Everyday life at an agency can get pretty crazy - deadlines here, client feedback there, and then there are also administrative tasks around the corner. So that you can concentrate fully on your creative work, you have the opportunity, ZEP Professional with various additional modules to make your daily agency life a little less stressful. From quoting to holiday management, you can plan, execute & complete unpleasant administrative tasks with just one tool. Like a modular system, you put together the modules that best support you in your daily doing:

Overtime, Absences & Holidays Module

Efficient planning of projects is just as much a part of everyday agency life as managing absences and staff absences of the team. However, manually recording and managing this data can be very time-consuming and lead to administrative bottlenecks. This is where the Overtime, Absences & Holidays Module comes into play. The module enables your agency to digitally record and manage the absences and staff absences of your team. By automatically maintaining an overtime account per employee, you also fulfil all the Requirements of the BAG for the recording of the complete working time. The module takes the digitisation of administrative tasks to a new level and can be implemented in 4 simple steps:

1. absence overview for better planning of holidays and absences.
2. ZEP Calendar can be easily integrated into your existing programmes.
3. monthly or year-end closing provides overview of booking status or blocking of times.
4. target/actual working time comparisons, detailed break overview and the possibility to create ready-made evaluations.

Module Departments, Branches & Locations

So that you always have an overview of your projects and teams in your agency, with the Departments module ZEP Professional provides you with an additional structuring level. And that even across several locations! Do you attach particular importance to internal cost allocation between departments or would you like to compare department-specific evaluations of times, costs and internal costs? The Departments module allows you to do just that. It is particularly popular with larger agencies with several branches, as it offers an effective way to organise and manage different departments.

Another advantage of the module: You can store individual department heads as recipients for leave/absence requests. This saves you the diversions via your headquarters and gives your locations and departments more creative freedom. The department head acts as an additional level for structuring the management team and can be considered as an admin within a part of the agency. With the Departments module, you map your administrative tasks better and more efficiently digitally and always have an overview of your projects and teams.

Module offers

For agencies, it is important to be creative and innovative. But efficiency also plays a central role here in order to survive in competition. With the Module offers you have the possibility to create standardised offers quickly and easily by storing templates in ZEP. Do several employees have access to the offer creation? No problem, because ZEP Professional makes it possible for several employees to work on the creation, review and submission of quotations at the same time. And if your customers prefer paperless working methods, you can send the quotations directly from the software by e-mail. This is not only more sustainable, but also much faster - and time is money in everyday agency life.

As soon as your customer accepts the offer, you can transfer it directly into a project with ZEP Professional. All positions of the offer are automatically transferred into the project, which means that you and your team can immediately start recording time on the offered project. This makes project planning easier, ensures smooth implementation and facilitates invoicing at the end of the project.

Invoicing module

For agencies looking for an effective invoicing system, ZEP Professional offers the ideal add-on module. Because: With the Invoicing module you can do everything from simple billing to creating individual payment plans. In just a few steps, you can invoice your employees' time and effort directly and even preconfigure this for your accounting department. Automatic generation of consecutive invoice numbers, direct sending of invoices by e-mail and automated text modules for standardised invoicing are just some of the advantages. For a smooth Transmission of your data to the accounting department ZEP also offers an export tool. This allows you to transmit all relevant data for a project to the accounting department without errors - for example with DATEV. Through this interface, you reduce the susceptibility to errors during transmission, which means that your entire agency benefits from optimised workflows.

Freelancers

If you also have freelancers working on projects, cooperation can sometimes be tedious. But: With the Module Freelancers can work together with your external employees in a CEP and have recorded time spent paid out directly as credits. The module gives you the option to mark freelancers directly as such and to set internal hourly and daily rates per project. You decide whether a freelancer writes invoices or receives credit notes. The use of credit notes makes it possible to invoice directly via ZEP Professional and thus saves you time and effort when creating and checking invoices. At the end of the project, you receive a detailed overview of all created credit notes. This gives you control over your collaboration with your freelancers and allows you to focus on what is really important - the successful completion of your projects.

Automated time recording promotes creativity

And now you can't see the wood for the trees? Don't panic! In order to be able to check out and enjoy all the advantages of ZEP Professional at your leisure, you have the option of downloading our Software solution for project time recording to be tested for (at least) 30 days. Your creativity is in much better hands in your projects than gathering dust in administrative tasks. And if you ever have a knot in your head, you have the our support team We will be happy to provide you with advice and assistance during our opening hours.