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Are you still tracking employee hours with paper timesheets or spreadsheets? If so, you’re not alone, but you’re leaving money on the table. Small businesses lose thousands of dollars annually to inaccurate time reporting. Research shows that proper time tracking solutions can reduce productivity leaks by up to 80%. Additionally, manual time tracking devours your administrative resources. Every minute spent calculating work hours is time you could invest in growing your business.

With hundreds of time tracking software options available on the market, finding the right one for your small business can be challenging. Many tools offer the exact same features as all of the others, making it difficult to create a shortlist of options to demo or test. To help, we’ve compiled this list of the nine best time tracking software for small businesses. Below, we share what types of small business each app is best for, what unique features each offers, and how they compare on price.

If your business is still using manual punch clocks, paper timesheets, or Excel spreadsheets to track employee time, you might want to consider upgrading to time tracking software. Time tracking software is a modern solution for tracking employees’ hours that significantly improves the process of tracking time. It saves managers and admins tons of time and makes running payroll quicker and easier. It also helps you reduce labor costs and prevent time theft.

Direct deposit is the electronic transfer of a paycheck directly into an employee’s bank account. Instead of issuing a paper check, the employer initiates an Automated Clearing House (ACH) transfer that routes the funds straight to the employee’s bank. Employers choose to pay employees by direct deposit for several reasons. It’s faster, more accurate, and easier to manage than paper checks. It reduces the cost of printing checks. And it also lowers the chances of lost or stolen checks.

Time card apps help employees track their time accurately and easily. They’re more efficient than paper time cards — which are hard to centralize, edit, and keep accurate records on — and can be simpler for small businesses to use than feature-heavy HR tools. If you’re ready to upgrade how you track employee time, we’re here to help.

If you want to use Excel to track PTO for your company, you don’t have to start from scratch. Many businesses have created free templates you can use that make it easy to calculate PTO accruals and see when employees are scheduled for time off. In this post, we’re going to share our five favorite free Excel PTO tracker templates, share the benefits and disadvantages of tracking PTO in Excel, and introduce you to a better option for PTO tracking.