Lowering costs is another way to increase profits when times are tough. Tracking time and expenses on a per-project or per-customer basis can give you a true understanding of where you are working profitably as an organization, and where you’re not. It is often the case that when managers are confronted with real data about where employees are spending their time, they realize that their previous assumptions and intuitions on this have been wildly inaccurate.

With this type of data in hand, you might learn that some of your customers are much more profitable – or much less – than you realized. Sometimes it even makes sense to send a certain class of customers to a competitor that is better suited to serve them. Yet unless you measure costs accurately, you’ll never know which ones to send packing.

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO