One of the biggest problems with timekeeping software is that users generally don’t adhere to the requirements. With the launch of crono.biz, keeping track of time is as easy as 1, 2, 3.
6 years ago, Guruhut, a bespoke Java development company, needed a timekeeping solution to keep track of the hours that staff members spent on various clients. A long search for the appropriate solution bore very little fruit.
“The solutions we found were too complex, not at all user friendly and provided far too much detail that wasn’t needed, but that we were sure as hell paying for,” says Grant Finnemore, founder of Guruhut. “So we decided to create our own.”
Finnemore was fortunate to have his company’s Java development expertise coupled with his hands-on understanding of exactly how the solution would be used by his team. They set to work on developing the simplest, most straightforward timekeeping solution that did only and exactly what it needed to do – and crono.biz was born.
“The thing that I wanted to achieve, more than anything else, was that users would adhere to the timekeeping protocol,” says Finnemore. “From every other solution we looked at or sampled, we knew that our users would get frustrated with unnecessary and complex steps and fields and convoluted codes for jobs. We wanted it to be as easy as possible for our staff to use the system.”
After months of development and years of refinement, crono.biz emerged with the following features:
- Only two fields for users to fill in: time and tags
- Autocomplete of tags
- Powerful tag classification and capture tools
- A daily reminder email to which users can reply with their time allocations
- Intelligent interpretation of time entries – so 1pm, 1, 13h00 and 13:00 are all understood to be the same thing.
- Stop-watch functionality to record unscheduled jobs as they come up.
- Excel reports at month end to view allocated hours.
- Flexible dashboards and powerful visualisations
The solution worked. Guruhut employees happily kept track of their hours, clients were billed, everyone was happy.
Then, one of Guruhut’s clients approached Finnemore for advice on a timekeeping solution for the development team within their organisation. They expressed the same complaints that Finnemore’s team had – timekeeping solutions were clunky and staff struggled to use them. Finnemore offered crono.biz to the client, and installed 60 licences at the premises and carried out training.
“They couldn’t be happier,” says Finnemore. “There’s always initial resistance to any new technology and working requirement, but after three months, their users were happily and reliably tracking their hours.”
Crono.biz was installed at another of Guruhut’s clients with similar results. Between their own usage patterns and the requirements of these, and other clients, Finnemore and his team refined and tweaked the product until it reached the point it’s at today: A powerful, easy-to-use, easy-to-adhere-to timekeeping tool. Because it’s available in a subscription model, the developers continue to tweak and develop it in line with their own – and their clients’ – requirements.
Crono.biz is available for R50 per user, per month and is completely based in the cloud. Integration with other systems can be spec’ed to suit client requirements.
“We’re really excited about the commercial release of crono.biz,” says Finnemore. “This is a product that we developed to answer to our own specific requirements, but we now know that it works in any environment where hours need to be accounted for. By saving time, we’ve made keeping time easier, simpler and more accurate.”