Sander Govaerts is Senior Marketing Consultant and Squad Lead at STRAREX, a Belgium-based, full-service strategic marketing agency which creates structured marketing plans based on strong data and detailed market research.

“Within just a few seconds, it’s easy to get a grasp of what’s happening across the organization and how we can make our lives easier and increase results. It’s amazing.”

Sander Govaerts, Senior Marketing Consultant and Squad Lead at STRAREX

The challenge: staying on top of time without wasting time on tracking

Before implementing Timeular, the team was using a different tool, but found it very slow to use. Every week it was taking each team member over an hour of their time to time track within the app, and this ended up with no one in the team consistently tracking their time. Team leads were having to spend even more time reminding everyone to go back and log what they were doing with their time.

In order to ensure that they were keeping their client projects within scope, the team needed to find a way to easily access insights and understand where their time was going. They needed to find a tool that was user friendly and helped employees quickly track their time without feeling like they were doing extra work.

The solution: supercharging time tracking with automation

Sander and the team structure Timeular by assigning a client to each folder and then listing activities within the folders. Using hashtags, the team then assigns activities to different contracts that they have with each client.

The team records which activity they are working on and then assigns it to each client. This makes it really easy for them to see exactly how much time they have spent on a client to date and identify when they need to focus more on another client who requires attention in order to maintain a good performance.

These insights also help the team make informed decisions around hiring external resources. When the insights show that the team is spending a lot of time on website management and they do not have the expertise to focus on this in-house, they can then outsource this to maximize their time and ensure that they are focusing their efforts in the places that make the most sense.

Using the calendar integration, Sander can easily transform calendar events into time entries with one click. This is just one of Timeular’s automation features. The team is also using context tracking to capture their activity across apps and turn it into time entries.

“We all use Timeular in a way that suits us best. Personally, I’ve always been a big fan of the Tracker. But nowadays, we are using the calendar integration more and more. Everything works so smoothly.”

Sander is able to quickly add time entries using Timeular’s suggestions based on past events. Together with the calendar integration, this speeds up time tracking and frees up more time for Sanders to get his work done.

“Timeular enables us to easily get insights into what everyone is doing and how we can all help each other more to maintain the right scope across projects.”

Sander explains how the automation features speed things up for the team. It used to take each team member an hour each week to look back through time entries. Sander can use the calendar integration to transform calendar entries into activities, add the relevant hashtag and it all takes under two minutes each day.

Now, thanks to Timeular, all Sander needs to do at the end of the week is just check that each team member has remembered to track their time and then everything is good to go.

“Everything is so quick now, especially with all of the new features that came out with auto-tracking.”

STRAREX has monthly retainers in place with their clients. Using Timeular, they are able to easily assess whether they have gone over scope for a client and redefine this going forward to ensure that they are staying profitable. They can then also use this data to upsell their services as they can demonstrate where they are spending their time using the insights found in Timeular. STRAREX also has a few clients that they bill according to the time spent on projects. Using the data in Timeular, it’s easy for Sanders to quickly identify the amount that they need to bill the client.

“Using Timeular has definitely saved us a significant amount of hours on a financial basis. The insights are invaluable and they really help when capacity forecasting. Timeular saves us so much time and also helps us use our resources in the right way. It’s so smart. A couple of minutes per day is all it takes and the impact is huge.”

To get the most out of the data, Sander filters the insights by each team member and then adds the details to the P&L, according to the cost allocated to each team member. With this information, he is then able to assess what capacity they have left and can allocate this to projects.

The result: remaining profitable and making informed decisions

By looking at the insights provided by Timeular, the STRAREX team is able to remain profitable by ensuring that they are providing the right level of resources and making informed decisions.

Sander uses the data to reflect back on how they were serving clients before to understand when things were going well, what they were doing and what they could replicate. For example, the data helps them identify when they were running paid campaigns and the results were good. This reflection helps them make the decision to repeat what they were doing before to bring the results in again.

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The post How a marketing agency saves time and remains profitable with automation appeared first on Timeular.

“Thanks to the transparent and accurate work-logs, we have been able to objectively bill up to 25% more time on different projects.”

Sascha Lindemann, Managing Director at Beilquadrat

The challenge: increasing transparency for the team and their clients

The agency started out small in 2007 and over time, one happy customer after another, kept growing significantly. It reached a point when it wasn’t easy anymore to keep an overview of how time across the team was spent. For Beilquadrat and many other agencies, this is key to being able to understand which events lead to the required results and what is required to stay efficient.

However, as the digital world has become more complex, understanding projects has become harder too. More channels, more formats, more content. Visualising all the steps required that lead to a result wasn’t a quick list for them anymore.

At the same time, client demands have evolved too, with more transparency required around what they are paying for, being one of them.

The solution: keeping it simple and employee-friendly

When introducing time tracking, the team wasn’t really on board. Hence Sascha wanted to lower the entry barrier by picking a fun and playful solution, which ultimately led him to the Timeular time tracking cube.

The Tracker helped him to get the team into the habit of tracking time. Over time as the number of projects and activities grew, they looked at alternative solutions but ended up staying with the Timeular software as they felt it still best met their needs. The look and feel of the modern and simple interface won against spreadsheet-like looking tools. Additionally, the flexible Timeular reports allow them to understand who worked on any project with just a few clicks.

The outcome: up to 25% revenue increase per project

Timeular – the agency time tracking software has been really helpful for them in many ways, and in particular, at helping them understand and organise their time spent on various projects to increase internal awareness and efficiency. Ultimately, thanks to the transparent and accurate work-logs, Beilquadrat has been able to objectively bill up to 25% more time on different projects.

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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, a good agency timesheet software, 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 daily. 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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“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 a 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 time tracking gadget 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, as an agency time tracking software, 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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The post How a communications agency tracks collective time to maintain the right level of client servicing appeared first on Timeular.

“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 as an agency time management software 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 finds 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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The post How an agency uses data to be accurate in the planning and budgeting of projects appeared first on Timeular.

Kaitlin is a partner and executive creative director who sees projects from inception through to delivery.

“People complain a lot less about time tracking now because of the easy interface of Timeular. It’s made time tracking a lot less of an obstacle and much more accessible.”

Kaitlin Snow Seamons, Executive Creative Director

The challenge: going over budget without warning

Harmon Brothers always has multiple projects on the go, all with different budgets, so it’s important for them to be able to know that a team member’s time has been allocated to the right project.

Before introducing Timeular, there was a 2-week lag for internal team member costs on projects, meaning that they went over budget without warning and were at risk of affecting their margins.

The solution: tracking budgets within Timeular

Team members can be working on multiple projects at once. Having each project as its own activity ensures that it’s clear what time counts toward which budget. Their accounts team downloads the hours tracked through Timeular and then runs payroll according to the data.

“Timeular is the agency time tracking software we rely on to get accurately paid, so we are meticulous with our tracking and include every task.“

Harmon Brothers charges clients a set fee per project. To keep costs in check and maintain margins, the team uses Timeular to track their time and keep an eye on the internal cost of each project.

Using the insights, the team is able to easily see how long each team member has spent on a project, which helps with accurate resource planning when starting new projects.

The outcome: increasing profitable margins

“I love how robust Timeular is. It’s increased our ability to see what’s going on in the business and helped us understand what changes are needed to maintain profitability.“

Using the tool means that they don’t have to rely on others for updates, which saves a lot of time. The data that Timeular provides helps them understand in real-time if they are overspending, and they can then make informed decisions.

Kaitlin loves the visual overview that Timeular provides and says that the bird’s-eye-view of the week helps her gauge the balance of work and personal life.

“The data acts as a review of how productive the day has been, and helps validate why I’m feeling tired when I look back and see the amount of hours clocked that week. Then I know it’s time to book a trip!“

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The post How an ad agency uses Timeular to stay within budget and remain profitable appeared first on Timeular.

“The precise reports give our customers a detailed overview about our services, which is key to getting their approval and long-term trust.”

Felix Kaczmarek, Owner of 22GRAD

The challenge: efficiently gathering accurate information

Felix Kaczmarek, owner of 22GRAD, promotes a fair customer billing policy which means the company does not operate using fees and retainers. Each client is charged according to the time spent on a project down to the minute – no more, no less.

Implementing this policy successfully means that Felix needs to provide precise documentation detailing the work done in the time charged, all without spending lots of precious time tracking it.

The solution: tracking time and exporting data

Felix and his team chose Timeular because the agency timesheet software its easy-to-use interface and range of features would help them achieve their goals. Using the quick filters and smart rounding feature to compile the necessary data for invoicing, Felix exports the monthly data and shares this with each client to maintain transparency and customer loyalty.

Timeular provided insight into how the team was spending their time and they were surprised to see how much time was spent in internal meetings. Rather than eliminating these meetings, Felix came up with ways to enhance internal meetings to make sure that there was a specific purpose to each one. These included sharing recent learnings, group learning activities and collaborative brainstorming, all which had a positive result.

By analysing the reports built by Timeular, the team was also able to identify inefficiencies and tackle them to boost profitability.

The outcome: increased efficiency and profitability

Timeular’s data enabled 22GRAD to bill more time, increase efficiency and increase the marketing agency’s profit margin, and through their transparency, earn clients’ trust and loyalty.

Like all agencies, 22GRAD must constantly balance the number of active projects with agency size. All in all, increasing the agency’s stability and predictability.

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“I would highly recommend Timeular for small teams like ours. Timeular has been a game-changer for us, and we couldn’t be happier with our choice.”

Keith Reynolds, CEO of spokemedia.io

The challenge: not enough time and no overview

CEO, Keith, and his team were struggling to find a tool that was easy to use and helped employees track their time. They needed a way to quickly see an overview of their progress through a project’s budget and streamline their workflow so that they had more time to spend on the tasks that mattered most.

The solution: using Timeular to remain profitable

Spoke has a team of full-time salaried staff working on a variety of projects and so reliable time tracking is crucial for remaining profitable.

They tried out other tools but were drawn to using Timeular thanks to its intuitive and user-friendly interface, making it a breeze for everyone to log their hours and monitor their progress.

Using Timeular, Spoke Media can now accurately assign each employee’s salary to the corresponding project, giving them a clear understanding of their financials. This has been revolutionized how Spoke works, as they can now make informed decisions based on real data.

The data from Timeular can be easily exported to Google Sheets, which later is imported to Quickbooks for invoicing. This seamless integration has streamlined their workflow and has made the invoicing process much faster.

If a client wants to see how their budget has been spent, the company can provide them with accurate reports from Timeular. This level of transparency has helped to build trust with their clients, and has been a major factor in their success.

The outcome: a clear overview and better focus

Thanks to Timeular, Spoke Media can now see across which projects the team is spending their working hours and whether some members are going into overtime. They now have a much better understanding of how much time is being allotted to each project and this helps them know where to focus.

This overview has been invaluable, and has helped the company to make improvements and become more productive.

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The post How a podcast production company streamlined internal billing with Timeular appeared first on Timeular.

“My time spent on revenue-generating projects has increased by ~10% each week and time in meetings decreased by about 1-2 meeting per week.”

Angela Morisette, SVP Business Operations at Scratch Financial

The challenge: switching between projects and losing track

Angela’s role juggles multiple projects at one time and so she often finds herself switching between tasks and losing track of what she had worked on and when.

Before she started using Timeular, Angela was trying to manually create Google calendar entries, which took up a lot of time and resulted in missing entries and inaccurate data. This left Angela in a position where it was hard to know how long tasks took and so making accurate future estimations was impossible.

The solution: easy and efficient time tracking

Despite her initial skepticism of the ease of building a time tracking habit, Angela was drawn to Timeular because of the Jira integration, which she knew would work well with her setup.

Giving herself the goal of tracking for at least one week, Angela was delighted to realise after a few days that the ease of use of Timeular meant that building a time tracking habit was much easier than she anticipated.

Tip: emulate Angela’s approach by setting up a budget in the Timeular app to track for a week.

Timeular provides Angela with the data she needs to build an awareness of where the hours in her working week go. She is able to quickly see how much time is spent on OKRs or on each client and, based on this information, she is able to make adjustments for the week ahead.

The outcome: focusing on revenue-generating work

Angela explains that Timeular’s data has supported her decision to say no to more meetings, which has allowed her to focus more on revenue-generating work.

As well as visibility of where her time goes, Angela finds the Tracker to be a great physical reminder to help her to focus and is now recommending Timeular to colleagues.

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The post How a SVP of Business Ops uses data to prioritize her time appeared first on Timeular.

“For me, Timeular is like a financial budget, but for time instead of money. Without Timeular I wouldn’t have a clear picture of how my time is being spent and if that time is making me money or losing it. Timeular is an invaluable tool for me not just for business but for making sure that my life is moving in the same direction as my goals.”

Ben Trawick, Owner of Braveo

The challenge: staying on top of the workload

Ben has a busy schedule and as he wears lots of hats, it’s important that he stays on top of his time. He needed to find something that made sure that the right tasks were getting his attention for the right amount of time.

The solution: a better balanced workload and power to create more jobs

Ben started using Timeular – the time tracking app for marketing agencies -as he liked how easy it was to use and how it wouldn’t take up any of his time creating entries. Ben starts his day by writing a to do list into a journal and then goes through and ticks them off. He uses the mornings for deep work, including his creative work and the tasks that are more mentally challenging. He believes it’s important to “get that work done when your brain is fresh.”

Afternoons are reserved for administrative tasks that don’t require as much mental input and for spending time with his five year old son.

He identified the major tasks that he does on a daily basis and uses them as his activities. He tracks production workflows, meetings, coaching, administration and finance, email and phone calls, and IT Support.

Do you want to know how to track your time? Take a look at our free guide about time tracking.

“I haven’t really had any challenges with Timeular. It’s easy to get it up and running quickly, improvements are constantly being made to the software, and the few times I’ve needed to contact support they’ve been responsive and helpful.”

Since his activities are fairly generic, he uses tags and notes to help be more specific. Ben then assigns them to clients and marks them as #billable or #notbillable and uses the notes field to save more detail about what he was doing at that time.

“With the information I get from Timeular, I can see which clients are using more of my time and make sure that I’m billing my clients appropriately.”

Ben uses the data he gets from Timeular insights to determine which aspects of his business require the most of his time. After that, he brings in additional resource to take on some of the load. He remarks: “I guess Timeular is a job creation tool as well, who knew?”

Ben’s tip: create generic activities and then be more specific about them in the notes

Ben suggests making your activities generic: “that way it doesn’t matter which client you’re working for or what project you’re working on. Choosing the appropriate task is so easy – you don’t have to think about it. And of course, you can then use the notes to be more specific about them.”

The outcome: ability to see time as a financial budget

Thanks to Timeular, Ben is able to better manage his workload and knows when he needs extra resource to be able to produce his best work.

Timeular has helped him be more efficient: “When I identify an imbalance I can address it and make changes to my schedule to make sure everything keeps moving forward and nothing gets left behind.”

“Understand that time is your most precious resource in life. You can get more food, you can make more money, but you can never make more time. Use it wisely and spend it intentionally.”

TIP: Do you know what time budgets are and what benefits they have? Read our blog to find out more.

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