How a communications agency tracks collective time to maintain the right level of client servicing

Eva Lightfoot is a Senior Account Executive at Harpswood, the can-do communications agency which works with clients that make the world greener, fairer, better. The team of nine fulfills all press and media relations requirements for a range of clients.

The challenge: collectively keeping track of time spent on each client

Eva and the team work with around five clients each and so they need a way to ensure that they divide their time fairly between projects and balance the workload.

Harpswood had tried out other time tracking software before but struggled to find a tool that stuck. They needed to find a way that they could easily track time to give them insight into their collective output per client.

The solution: tracking with ease to get a clear picture

Harpswood’s clients are all on retainer agreements and they have a set number of KPIs to meet throughout the year.

The team uses hashtags to assign activities to each client including: client comms, writing and newsjacking. This allows Harpswood to go granular with the insights and means that they aren’t disrupting their workflow by having to take time to stop and think about how to log their activities. 

Eva explains that time tracking in Timeular helps the team stay productive as they find it helpful seeing how much time they’ve spent on a task: “it’s really helpful to see how long things are taking. If you’ve been writing a press release for an hour then Timeular serves as a reminder to think about whether enough time has already been spent and if it’s time to move onto the next task.”

Harpswood finds it helps to have a breakdown of how the team is spending their time so that they can track by fee to see how much time is going towards each client. The data gives them clear insight into whether they are under or over servicing clients and allows them to make data-informed adjustments to output or the fee charged.

The Harpswood team all use the Tracker which they find serves as a helpful reminder and so they stay on top of instant tracking. They also use the Outlook Calendar integration to seamlessly sync their diaries with their Timeular calendar entries.

The outcome: remaining profitable and productive

Timeular has allowed Harpswood to easily keep on top of time as a team and informs whether they have spent enough or too little time on each client, helping them stay within margins.

They use the insights from Timeular to help inform how they will take on clients in the future as they can use the accurate data to understand how much they should charge for a retainer based on the amount of work involved.