How designers use Timeular to efficiently log billable time and stay within budget

Ingólfur Magnússon is a Flight Procedure Designer at Isavia ANS. He works for the air navigation service provider in Iceland and designs instrument flight procedures, the routes that get the airplanes safely from the ground up into the air and back again without hitting any obstacles, terrain or buildings. Ingólfur has been a Timeular user since the initial Kickstarter campaign.

The challenge: streamlining how to track billable hours

Ingólfur and the Isavia ANS team were using an outdated Icelandic system to try and log their billable time but the software wasn’t designed to be used as a billing system but rather as a system used by maintenance personnel to log hours working on a specific equipment and to track the downtime of equipment. 

They needed to find an easy way to track all of their billable time that meant they had more hours in the day to do their important work.

The solution: saving time and reducing the work

Ingólfur implemented Timeular the Isavia team so that they could efficiently track all of their billable time.

Before they were using Timeular, the team used to have to constantly switch between the airports and projects they were working on and save and close and open the software frequently, which was very time consuming.

“The cartographer in the team was writing down his entries in a diary and then transferring them into the old software, which created double work. The time saving with Timeular has been significant.”

Now that the team uses Timeular, they use folders for each customer or airport that they bill and then assign projects within those folders. Their entries include the hours worked, who to bill and comments detailing the work they were doing during that time.

The billable hours are then sent to the domestic airport company and also to the airports in Greenland and the Faroe Islands that Ingólfur and his team work with.

The result: accurate time entries, useful estimations and no more going over budget

Extracting information from the old system required a lot of manual work and the reports generated lacked accuracy. Using Timeular has streamlined the process and saved Ingólfur and his team a lot of time thanks to the automatic entries.

Ingólfur is able to quickly export the information and send them the reports so that they have all of the information they need. “Head management are very happy with the visual reports and the level of information available,” he explains.

“The finance department is really happy now that we use Timeular as it not only saves us time but it also saves them time and makes their jobs easier.”

By referring to past activity entries, the Isavia team is able to accurately estimate how many hours a project will take in total, which they find useful when going out to tender for an external project with a quote for their work.

The team has found using the budgets feature particularly as well as, before they started using Timeular as a billable hour software, they had no way to understand what other people in the team were doing and how many hours they had collectively worked on a project in total.

Now they are able to easily see when they are nearing the top of the budget and take action in good time. Thanks to the alerts, they can alert the customer that they may go over the estimated hours and this opens up a discussion around increasing the budget and encourages them to analyze why they are spending so many hours on the task.