How a marketing agency saves time and remains profitable with automation

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.

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.