TIME REPORTING DESKTOP APP
How a B2B tech company streamlined its T&M reporting with a custom app
The story of a growing software development company that improved their T&M project report’s fill rate by 82% with a simple and intuitive desktop app.
Overview
We wanted to build a product for internal use that would make time tracking less of a hassle. The goal was to assist teams in time reporting so that they don't waste time on it.
Challange
We noticed that companies offering services billed in the Time&Materials model or that are budget-based face a similar challenge: teams report their time on the last day of the month. Sometimes they forget to do it which results in incomplete, inaccurate reports. In Brainhub we knew it from its own experience and we wanted to design and build a new app that would be more user-friendly and efficient for everyone.
Solution
As we were looking for a solution that would track and report time, we noticed that products existing on the market tend to have more and more functionalities enabling to report more and more details. We developed the idea for the application during the hackathon. What we wanted was to create an easy-to-use system that would be more than just another form to fill - we decided to build an assistant for listing and reporting time that would intelligently prepare reports. Our system enables to track time daily or weekly, for multiple or only a few tasks at the time. It also works offline and has the ability to generate custom reports with Google Sheets.
We designed Anthill in a way that significantly increases the ratio of filled spreadsheets at the end of the billing period (whether it's a month, a sprint or something else), so that everyone could confirm effortlessly how much time they spent on which task.
In Anthill, the user doesn’t need another admin panel as it is possible to generate summaries, integrate sheets, create beautiful graphs and automate with Google Scripts. Also, the app automatically synchronizes time that is tracked offline.
We focused on our business needs and designed an easy-to-use application, which let us reporting time faster. Thanks to the fact, in the first month, application increased our weekly reports fill rate by 82%.
Technology stack
Anthill was built with the usage of Electron which provided a great cross-platform experience. It allowed to create a simple, yet efficient and extremely intuitive time tracking app. On the backend we used our own framework, Hadron.
The web application was written in React and we also applied the ready-to-use React-admin framework so we wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel.
