Office 365

Time Tracking for Outlook 365 Calendar 

Part of the Microsoft Office 365 suite, the Microsoft Calendar is a business-essential tool for managing events and webinar invitations, and of course - for work meetings. As most meetings fall into operational or team management activities, it’s critical to businesses who bill by their time to time tarck it.

When meetings are part of the services packages you’re providing – like advising, consulting, and presenting deliverables to clients – you want to accurately track the time spent with clients, for billing purposes. 

You may want to use meetings time insights to re-shape your offering. Are your clients using update meetings time to get free consulting? Limit your offering to 3 x45 mins sessions. 

From an operational standpoint, you want to track the time spent in meetings to understand how you split productive time between internal meetings and client engagements. Timesheet creation is also faster as the meetings are imported for you on your timeline.

Can Office 365 track time? 

No, Office 365 Calendar does not track time, but it records the pre-planned duration of the meeting. The best way to track the actual time spent of meetings is by logging manually the duration of the meeting – aided by Zoom and Teams, if the meerting is online - or by your very own office clock.

Manual logging is a lot of work, it’s highly distracting, and requires a lot of maintenance to be able to get anything that remotely resembles an accurate timesheet. Plus, 88% of spreadsheets contain errors. If you’re relying on manual logging of meeting time, you could be misreporting.

Our advice: let Office 365 Calendar manage your diary, Timely can handle the time tracking.

Can Office 365 track time? 

Anyone in the company can set up an Office 365 integration, and you can connect as many calendars as you own. Your timeline will show all public meetings scheduled in the past 30 days, and the meetings you’ve planned for the following three days. Meeting details – such as guests, start time and end time – will show up on your timeline, saving you time from creating time timesheet entries for these events.

What are the benefits of tracking time in Outlook 365 Calendar?

Visualise meeting time to support productive work patterns

Combined with the Google calendar integrations, this Office 365 integration will help you understand how much of your active work time is spent in meetings. 

So, if you’re a consultant and spend most of your time meeting with stakeholders and teams, you can see that up to 80% of your work day is spent to that effect. This may be right for you, but it’s not productive for someone who’s making individual contributions and needs focus time to deliver their work. 

We recommend that you create a separate Timely project for client meetings, with tags for each type of meeting: intro calls, progress update, consulting, and ad-hoc meetings. Finally, you can view how much meeting time is rightfully billable and which meetings impacted team productivity unnecessarily.

Increase meeting accountability

In an average consultancy, employees spend 31 hours per week on calls on a regular basis. Add in-person meetings to this figure, and you’ll quickly realise that 90% of your workweek is gone. No wonder we feel the need to work late, sacrificing personal time to keep up with both your work and calendar commitments. 

The Timely for Office 265 Calendar integration helps you, as an organisation, understand how to better utilise company time while supporting a productive and happier workforce.

In addition to seeing time distribution across different departments and meeting types, you can see the impact of meeting time on project delivery. Using the same tagging system described before, you can create reports for projects that are off-track and off-budget to calculate how much time was spent in meetings. If meetings and travel time are a problem, you can discuss it with clients or decide to hire more people who are solely responsible for executing projects, as opposed to managing client relationships and outlining the strategy.

Billing clients accurately

The Timely for Office 365 Calendar integration allows you to account for ALL of your team’s time spent on a project – not just the time planned for on paper. 

Spent 30 minutes travelling to a client’s office to present… billable

Spent 41 minutes talking the client through the next project… billable

Spent 2 minutes forwarding an email, so the client doesn’t have to find it in their inbox… billable

And then once you have this information, assigning it to the correct project is as simple as dragging the memory to the right project.

Profitability

Knowing what a meeting cost you as a business is just as important as knowing how much you’re able to bill for it. One director, one consultant, one manager, two execs, and suddenly that 60-minute meeting just cost the businesses FIVE hours in deliverable time – what’s more, we’re guessing that the director and the consultant’s time isn’t cheap to begin with.

As a starting point, understanding where time is going from an operational standpoint will allow your leaders to introduce policies and behaviours in your teams which encourage asynchronous communication – increasing the time they can spend on productive and profitable work – increasing your ROI. 

When meetings are charged to a client, capturing collective time spent is a challenge through Google Calendar alone, but an absolute breeze in Timely.

Who can make the most of this Google Calendar integration?

• Companies that bill by the hour
• Digital agencies, consultants, accountants
• Professional services
• Advisors, personal concierges, trainers, and coaches
• Remote teams

Timely and Office 365 Calendar

Whether you’re looking to understand your team’s time more effectively or needing to bill your clients more accurately, by connecting your Office 365 Calendar to Timely through this integration will enable to right data to be passed into your projects.

This in turn will drive efficiencies across your business, allowing you and your team to focus your time and energy on profitable and productive work, rather than wondering why feel you’re always in meetings.