“Timeular has really helped us identify areas of inefficiency and implement new processes. We have saved 25% of our time thanks to Timeular.”

Erin Enderle, Attorney at Levy & Associates

The challenge: finding a way to improve efficiency and stay profitable

When the two firms that now form Levy & Associates merged, Erin needed a way to understand how each team was using their time and what improvements they could make to ensure they were working in a similar fashion and unify the process. One firm was very technological and operated remotely, and the other firm was much more traditional with 80 people working in an office and so Erin needed a way to easily understand how she could ensure efficiency across both.

The solution: leveraging the data to identify where efficiency can be improved

At first, the attorneys were against using Timeular as they felt that introducing a time tracking tool was leading towards micromanagement. To move past this, Erin started using Timeular herself and presented her data to the team so that they would realize that time tracking was not a form of micromanagement but more a way of identifying trends and being able to understand where time is going.

Rather than looking at how long each individual activity lasted, what time she had started and finished work, or how many hours she had worked in total, Erin demonstrated how Timeular made it easy to quickly see how many hours she had spent on profitable activities rather than tasks such as emailing.

Quickly the attorneys began to see that Timeular was a helpful tool as they were able to look at their data and see where they had spent too much time on certain activities and which activities they needed to focus more time on.  Attorneys are expected to spend half of their time on profitable activities and then the other half on the activities that are not linked to profitability including answering emails and attending court hearings.

Erin meets with the attorneys every week and together they look through the insights provided by Timeular. They have seven activities that their work falls into: standard attorney drafting, production (assigning lawsuits and judgements, these are the things that drive the business), communications, hearing and trial attendance, hearing and trial preparation, meetings, other and non-attorney support work. The expectation is that 40% of an attorney’s time should be spent on production.

The result: 25% more time and improved processes

Erin explained that the attorneys have been surprised when looking through the data that Timeular generates. One attorney didn’t realize how much time they were spending on emails and have now made some changes to improve the balance.

When the team started using Timeular, Erin was able to identify that attorneys were spending a vast amount of time on preparation for hearings. As Levy & Associates is a national law firm, they have a lot of hearings covered by numerous attorneys in varying states. Often an attorney will work on the preparation for the hearing, but another attorney will attend and do the preparation for the hearing too. The hearing is being prepared for twice and both attorneys are paid.

The owner of Levy & Associates also uses Timeular to see an overview of how the team is spending their time, and so it’s helpful for the team to have everything in the same place that’s accessible to those who need it.

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As part of this project, they have set up a small, community-driven chain of organic grocery stores that aims to build a system to show what the economy could look like if these problems were solved. There is no private ownership involved and all profits are donated towards fighting extreme poverty and climate change.

The store is run on a membership model: members can participate by spending three hours a month volunteering in the store to support the movement and receive a discount on their shopping.

“Now that we are growing, Timeular is crucial to our organization for being able to operate professionally.”

Mattis Steib, Co-founder of Robin Hood Store

The challenge: finding a way to maximise efficiency

The Robin Hood Store team consists of multiple volunteers and also 11 employees who work at least 15 hours a week. As the team began to grow the system that they are aiming to build, they realized that they needed an easy way to track their time to help them understand where it’s going and how they can maximize efficiency. They also needed a way to manage the HR organizational parts of a growing business, including recording paid leave, sick leave and staying on top of over and under hours.

The solution: harnessing the power of Timeular’s data

All employees who work at least 15 hours a week now use Timeular. They were drawn to Timeular’s Tracker and the QuickTrack shortcut to quickly create time entries for their activities and to create a record of their working hours and time off.

The team operates with a holacratic structure and is divided into different teams, which is represented by the folders within Timeular. Each team uses two activities: one for ‘recurring tasks’ and the other for capturing ‘improvement tasks.’ They also use hashtags to define the specific tasks they are working on.

Mattis uses the data to understand how they are spending their time across the recurring tasks and uses this to inform his decision about whether to invest time automating certain tasks going forward.

One recent decision Mattis made was informed by Timeular data: “as weekends are busier in the store, we have a separate stock ordering process to support this. Thanks to the data in Timeular, I was able to easily understand how much time this recurring activity was absorbing and made the decision to invest an hour into automating part of the process. This has saved us at least 30 minutes every week, which really adds up over time.”

Mattis exports the data from Timeular into a G-sheet that is set up to calculate the data according to the hours each team member is set to work and ensures that they do not owe any time. This sheet also helps them identify whether the team has used their holiday allowance or if any time off in lieu is owed. This also easily enables employees to adjust their hours over several days depending on if they have over or under hours.

Another part of Robin Hood Store’s mission is to grow the system that they are trying to build. There is no private profit involved but they instead reinvest the bigger part of the profit in order to grow. It’s important for them to be able to know how much they’re investing in terms of time and what they are doing with the time spent on a daily basis.

The outcome: supporting growth with Timeular

Thanks to Timeular, Mattis and the team are now able to accurately calculate over and under hours, which is important to them when operating as a professional organization.

Before introducing Timeular, Mattis describes the way that they were trying to keep on top of hours worked and leave taken as chaotic: “everything before was vague and operated on a trust base. We needed a proper solution to support us as we grew.”

Going forward, Mattis and the team will be using Timeular’s leave tracker which can replace everything they have been doing in the G-sheet with their exported data.

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Noah works within a team of five who are responsible for end user experience. They support Bang & Olufsen employees with all IT requests.

“Timeular is a fantastic tool. Now that we efficiently track our time and know where each minute is going, task management has become more efficient, which has increased overall productivity within out team. This in turn has enabled us to be better at prioritizing tasks and document our journey, making our entire team aware of how we allocate our time and resources.”

Noah Ruseng Bested, IT Support Assistant, Bang & Olufsen

The challenge: finding a way to easily understand where time is being spent

Before they discovered Timeular, Noah and the team didn’t have a way to track their time and were in the dark when it came to knowing where their time was spent. They needed to find a way to effortlessly log where their time was going so that they could gain a better understanding of resource allocation and improve task management.

When looking for a tool, they had a couple of goals in mind: to unlock a diverse and deep understanding of each team member’s role and to ensure that they were working as efficiently as possible to maximize overall productivity within the team.

The solution: the ability to better plan time going forward

Noah and the team track their time using several different activities including: meetings, walk-ins/disturbances, projects, service now (their ticketing system), unspecified (for activities that fall outside of the main categories), transport (to capture time spent traveling to and from work), breaks and administration. The ‘walk ins/disturbance’ activity is used when a user requires immediate help and the team stops working on their set task.

Most of the team uses the Tracker, Noah included: “I find that using the Tracker speeds things up and makes it really easy to track my time.” The entire team uses the Timeular mobile companion, which allows them to easily track time on the go, with the option of adding notes and tags.

The team uses hashtags to include further detail relating to logged activities. They also track their projects using hashtags, which allows them to easily see how much collective time has been spent on each project. With this information, they are able to accurately bill any external companies they are working with.

With the data provided by Timeular, the team has a precise understanding of exactly where their time is used and this allows them to better plan their time going forward.

The outcome: maximising profitability by prioritising ‘focus mode’

“Our manager is really happy that we all use Timeular, and we are all very fond of it. With the data, our manager can see how we allocate our time and resources, and also see which areas require resources to ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction.”

Thanks to Timeular, the IT team at Bang & Olufsen are able to easily see how much time they’re spending on small tasks and how much time this all adds up to. Before using Timeular, they weren’t aware of just how much time doing all of the small tasks took out of their working hours that they usually spend working on the things they actually have to work on.

As a result, they now have dedicated times when they are in ‘focus mode’, which is when they only have to work on projects or IT support and are not open to disturbances.

“Timeular has allowed us to work more efficiently. Thanks to the insights, we have been able to make a lot of changes to the IT structure to work more efficiently. This has saved each team member around two hours per week, which is 10 hours gained in total across the team, each week.”

By tracking how the team spends their time, they are able to identify how much time is spent on tasks that do not contribute towards overall profitability. With this data, the team can now ensure that they focus their time on activities that are valuable to the business, which boost profitability.

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“The more a project is worked on, the more costly it becomes, so it’s important that the team knows how much time is being spent on a project in total, as the project progresses and not just at the end.”

Mieke Motmans, Ortho Clinical Engineering Team Leader at Materialise

The challenge: finding a way to identify how much time is spent on each project

Mieke’s team focuses on processing cases for their customers. The team works on different projects and so it’s important for them to be able to identify how much time they spend on each case and on which project.

Before they started using Timeular, the Materialise Team worked with a system that they checked on a monthly basis. They were required to log how much time they had spent on each task in hour long blocks. During busy periods, the team often forgot to log their hours and so they would fill out their hours at the end of the month using guess work, which led to a lot of inaccuracy and took up time.

The solution: using the insights to remain profitable

Mieke and the team use Timeular to log how much time they are spending on each case and project. Materialise makes cost calculations based on each product separately and so it’s important for them to have an accurate record of how the time is spent. Often they are involved in bigger projects from other teams and so it’s helpful for them to keep track of how much effort is being put into a project.

Using the data, Mieke can see how busy each team member has been and if there is time spare to work on projects. This is helpful as they try to keep the time spent on cases equal across the team so that they can all work on projects too. The process engineers also use the data to identify where they can increase efficiency.

The team tracks the issues they are working on by assigning them to a category. The data is exported to Excel and then the team adds their case information to make final reports. The team uses hashtags to differentiate between projects. This helps them understand how much time they’re spending on issues in total and provides the information they need when they make the case to management to ask for additional help.

It’s helpful for project managers to know who worked on each project and how much time was spent in total. Every month they look at the total amount of time spent on a specific product and check whether it was realistic and within budget. Timeular helps the team stay profitable.

The outcome: accurate data that ensures projects stay within budget

Thanks to Timeular, the data that the team generates is now entirely accurate, much broader and provides a much more specific breakdown which helps the team learn from how they’ve spent their time. Projects now stay within budget and the team ensures that work is evenly distributed and that any spare time is enjoyed fairly across the team on projects outside of the usual cases.

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“Timeular has saved us so much time. It’s already paid for itself because we are saving at least two hours every month by no longer transferring details written down on paper into our old system.”

Ingólfur Magnússon, Flight Procedure Designer at Isavia ANS

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.

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“The CodeFlügel team is now in the habit of tracking all of their time. Thanks to Timeular it’s much easier, much more fun and much more convenient. Some team members use the Tracker and some track directly in the app. It’s great that there’s a solution that meets each individual’s needs.”

Claus Degendorfer, CEO of CodeFlügel

The challenge: finding a way to instantly track time to close the discrepancy between estimations and actual time taken

Before the team started using Timeular, they noticed that there were big differences between their initial estimations and the time that the task ended up taking. For Claus and the team, it’s important to be able to calculate time on an hourly basis and have accurate estimations.

Before implementing Timeular, the team was tracking time in chunks of 15, 30, and 45 minutes. No one was tracking as they went along and most kept notes on a sticky note and loosely logged their time at the end of the day when thinking back over their tasks.

The team has a CMS system where they book their working times against projects and use JIRA for project management on a task basis. They needed to find a solution to somehow connect the two systems as both contained crucial information, all while making time tracking an effortless and convenient task that motivated the team to create instant time entries.

Read also: The best Jira time tracking integration.

The solution: integrating JIRA with Timeular to optimize accuracy

The team tracks their billable time and reviews the insights on a daily basis. By looking at the overview of the tasks that were created the day before, they can compare the estimations with how long the tasks took.

By connecting Timeular to Jira, the CodeFlügel team can use the time tracking functionality to directly assign work logs to a specific JIRA issue. The tasks are filled with the actual real-time entries from the developers. Part of the process is automated so that it’s easier for the developers and the data is more accurate.

The team then uses dashboards and lists in JIRA to manage their work-logs as well as see the plan and actual time taken.

“We can learn from estimations vs the time that was actually needed on a project. With this information we can then optimise the process.”

The result: understanding where the time goes and being more accurate with estimations 

Thanks to Timeular, CodeFlügel has a much better understanding of where their time goes and their estimations are much more accurate. The team have built the habit of tracking all of their time which has resulted in more billable hours.

Another benefit is, that at the end of the day, the developers know exactly what time they spend on which task and can book it into the CMS system accordingly.

“The benefit is definitely that we have numbers on a board and at all the time see what’s going on throughout the projects. Additionally the employees know exactly which task took how many hours per day.”

Claus Degendorfer, CEO of CodeFlügel

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Paula Engebretson is a certified life coach and host of the podcast, I’m Busy Being Awesome. Supporting adults with ADHD, she empowers them to let go of perfectionism, take decisive action, and work with their ADHD to achieve their goals. Through personalized one-on-one coaching and small group sessions, Paula collaborates with her clients, helping them embrace their strengths and thrive.

“One of the many things I love about Timeular is that when I go into hyper-focus and experience time blindness, I don’t know whether it’s been five minutes or five hours. Timeular helps me keep track of this.”

Paula Engebretson, certified life coach and host of the podcast, I’m Busy Being Awesome

The challenge: battling burnout

Paula was struggling with burnout and was working all the time with no idea where all of her time was going. She needed a way to keep track of her time so that she could be intentional with how she spent it.

The solution: using Timeular to be intentional with time

Paula tracks her time using activities including: podcasting, creative work, email, client work, admin, self coaching. Paula uses Timeular with the time management cube to accurately track how long it takes her to complete a task. She creates her schedule around this and finds that Timeular helps give her structure.

She explains that the Tracker helps her because: “it’s great for an ADHD brain. I can see it so I can turn it.”

Paula tends to do lots of batch work so she allocates podcasts to Mondays, calls and admin to Tuesdays and then she coaches her clients on Wednesday and Thursday. She finds that this approach helps her maintain focus as less context switching is favorable for her brain. She breaks her tasks into really small activities so that she doesn’t procrastinate.

“Timeular helps highlight where the time is actually going, where energy leaks happen, and identify patterns in productivity peaks and valleys to create a more effective schedule.“

Paula emphasizes the importance of taking breaks between activities to allow the brain time for transition. She explains that breaks are restorative and important when maintaining productivity: “we are humans and not robots.”

Timeular has helped Paula identify tasks that are taking up a lot of her time and she makes the data-informed decision to delegate based on the insights and hire a freelancer. A task that was taking her 90 minutes could take a freelancer 25 minutes, freeing up more time for Paula.

Paula makes decisions to delegate tasks based on the insights that Timeular provides.

“I knew I needed to hire a virtual assistant to help with designing my social media posts and inbox management. The data in Timeular helped inform which type of virtual assistant I needed as I could see that I was spending a lot of time responding to emails and in Slack. I was able to identify what sort of assistant I needed and for how many hours.”

She reviews her data on a Friday using David Allen’s approach. At the end of the month she maps out goals using the data from Timeular to inform what she does next.

The outcome: surprising insights 

Paula has been surprised by some of Timeular’s insights. She admits that she puts off writing emails as she thinks they will take lots of time. When she then commits to the task, she finds that the email takes three minutes of her time. At the other end of the scale, she starts a design task that she thinks will take no time at all and 40 minutes later she finds that she is still looking for a specific color.

“Timeular is supportive in allowing me to be intentional with my time.”

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“We all love using Timeular. It’s really easy to use and straightforward, especially if you haven’t done time tracking before. We actually enjoy using it and it’s so helpful.”

Eva Lightfoot, Senior Account Executive, Harpswood

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.

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“I’ve doubled my revenue thanks to Timeular and managed to halve how much I work. Timeular helped me understand where I needed to make changes to become more efficient and this has allowed me to cut down my time spent working.”

Valdemar Alfred, Owner of Valdefar

The challenge: building and maintaining a time tracking habit

Valdemar charges his clients a fixed price for projects as it’s easier to sell services when able to give a guide for the overall cost.

He needed a way to be able to effortlessly keep track of how long each stage of the creative process took from idea through to delivery so that he knew how to quote and charge the right amount.

Valdemar had tried other team time tracking solutions but struggled to maintain the habit and so was without the accurate data that he needed.

The solution: supercharging Timeular with integrations

Valdemar came across Timeular through a referral from his friend and uses the software with his team of two assistants as an internal project managing tool. Using the Timeular API, he set up an integration with Zapier and Google Sheets and uses the combination to create elaborate sheets containing all the necessary information about clients and the associated budgets.

Every time Valdemar creates a time entry using the Tracker, it creates a line in the Google sheet so that he can always follow how many hours he has spent on the project to date and how far away he is from hitting the budget. His team uses a folder for each client so they can easily see an overview of the ongoing projects.

Tip: you can now use our budgets feature to manage client and project budgets and ensure that you never go over budget again.

Thanks to Timeular, Valdemar is able to deliver projects before the budget runs out, which means he is able to stay profitable, he can make a better hourly rate and the client is happy with his efficient work, so it’s a win-win for everyone!

Valdemar’s preferred tracking method is the Tracker but his team tracks their time through the desktop app. The options work well for the team and they find it incredibly beneficial being able to see all of their data in the same place so that they know how much time they’ve collectively contributed towards the set budget and how much of their time is taken up by admin and what portion is billable.

The outcome: doubled earnings, halved hours

Valdemar has made some surprising revelations thanks to the insights Timeular has unlocked: he’s realized that out of an eight hour day, a lot of time is spent on activities that are not work including breaks and socializing with colleagues. Knowing this has helped him optimize his working time:

Valdemar explains that he was working in the dark before using Timeular as he had no idea how many hours he was spending on projects. He says that looking back, he realizes he could have made three times more revenue if he had managed his time.

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“Since we started using Timeular and tracking our time, we’ve never made another mistake in planning, creating accurate proposals or budgeting for clients. It’s so easy to use. Everyone uses it and it shows.”

AC Coppens, Founder of THE CATALYSTS

The challenge: seeing an accurate comparison of estimations vs actual time taken

The agency always has lots of different projects on the go and it’s important for the team to be able to see an exact breakdown of their work and how it compares to the budgets they have set.

“You think you know how much time you spend on stuff, but this is absolutely not true.”

The team tried a few solutions but found them too complicated trying to categorize what they were working on. They were keen to learn about what they were spending their time on to allow them to improve how they made offers and proposals to clients.

The solution: using Timeular to stay on top of the workload

AC and the team started using Timeular and found that it worked perfectly for tracking their billable hours and helped them stay on top of their workload.

“You need to track for a while to have a representative sample of what kind of projects you’re working on. It’s an investment, but it’s a good one as if you commit to tracking then you can easily see exactly how many hours you’ve spent on something. Using the breakdown of the tasks, you can then write accurate proposals using perfect estimations.”

Describing themselves as perfectionists, the team often find themselves over delivering on projects and spending more time on projects than they projected.

The outcome: being prepared and strategic with time

By consistently adding their time entries, the team was able to easily see how they were spending their time. This means they are more able to prepare the load and be more strategic with their goals or investments.

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