Keeping track of jobs in your business is a basic process every business needs. The ability to understand when a job was received, its expected completion date and its progress through the office delivers a number of benefits to you:

• You control your business and determine what work gets done and when
• You are able to determine what resources you need, the skills to apply and the capacity of your business
• You and your team have a built in mechanism for planning your time
• You can more effectively manage your clients and their expectations
• If required, you can start doing forecasting around your potential income stream
• You have an "early warning system" for any problems that may arise.

Importantly, you don't have to invest in an expensive system to track jobs, although for larger businesses, it is certainly a great advantage. The point is, you have a centralised list of every piece of work that your business is about to complete. As you know, the best system in the world can easily turn into the biggest white elephant unless it is used and used correctly. That means you also need to have in place a system to ensure new jobs are entered when they arrive, staff update records at key checkpoints and tasks are closed when the invoice is sent out. A procedure for tracking jobs doesn't have to be complicated:

• When a job arrives it is logged into the tracking system (we suggest this be a centralised function to ensure all jobs are tracked appropriately)
• Against the record is the date received, basic client information, a letter or word to distinguish the type of job, who it is assigned to, estimated completion date and, if known, an estimate of cost
• The person responsible for completing the job then updates the tracking system at agreed milestones and closes the task when the job is completed and the invoice sent.

As you can see, the procedure is basic common sense. We do suggest that you put in place meaningful milestones for each type of job being tracked. This simple process will allow you to look at your entire business each day and determine where jobs are running behind schedule, where bottlenecks are occurring, which of your team are under/over-utilised etc. The best thing however, is the control you have over your work. If you opt for a "first in, first out" policy with new work, you not only get to effectively manage your own time, you also have a way of dealing with those clients who believe you need to drop everything to do their work! Tracking work will add a few additional minutes to each job but the investment is worth it.