[Time Tracking]
At TIMETOACT GROUP, every hour worked translates into value - whether it's billed to a customer or allocated to an internal project. Yet the time-tracking process seemed cursed as every month the same tragic chain of events unfolds:
A harmless email reminder lands in the inboxes of unsuspecting employees. "🕒 Reminder: Submit Your Worklogs Before Friday!"
At first, no one pays attention. "I have plenty of time," they think. But time is the one thing they don’t have.
By Thursday afternoon agitation and desperation starts going around as the time-tracking monsters start to appear:
The Phantom of Forgotten Hours
The ghost of tasks past, whispering, "You definitely worked on something last Tuesday... but what?"
The Spreadsheet Zombie
Forced to reconstruct an entire week's worth of work, dead-eyed employees scroll through emails, Slack messages, and Jira tickets, hoping to resurrect lost time.
The Overlord of Overtime
Looming over managers, demanding to know, "WHY IS THE BUDGET OVERBOOKED?! WHO LOGGED 300 HOURS?!"
The wicked-witch of the error account
Cackling around team leads and project managers as they crumble under the burden to untangle where to book those hours on the “error account”.
And then, the worst of them all arrives - The Payroll- and/or Invoicing-Reaper.
It does not forgive. It does not forget. It only asks one thing:
-
"Why does your time-sheet say you worked 27 hours on Monday?"
The only escape? Submitting worklogs as work happens. But only few manage to do it. And next month, it will happen again.
Sound familiar to you? Our Team Members logged hours in disconnected systems, often double logging to ensure customer invoices and inter-company invoices could be generated. Invoicing for customer projects? Slow and error-prone. Payroll processing? Frustratingly inefficient. With nearly 1400 employees, missing or incorrect worklogs where a constant risk which required close tracking by project managers and team leads, leading to excessive admin work. Not too mention HR checking up on overtime.
The solution? Leveraging the power of Atlassian Jira, Tempo Timesheets and neat interface to SAP - bridging the gap between work, billing, and payroll seamlessly. The result? Thousands of saved admin hours, no more invoice errors, full financial visibility and… team members that can focus on their work instead of time-sheet construction. Sure, human error can still happen - but it’s easier to spot and to fix then ever before.
The Challenge: The Hidden Cost of Disconnected Time Tracking
Before implementing the integration, TIMETOACT GROUP struggled with:
Manual Time Entry Across Multiple Systems
Team Members had to log hours in Tempo Timesheets, SAP, and external tools, leading to duplication, mistakes, and missing worklogs.
Risk of inaccurate Customer Invoicing
Time-tracking errors meant risk of wrong invoices, leading to financial losses and/or unhappy customer’s accounting department.
Costly Worklog Validation
Spotting Errors in worklogs, finding missing worklogs and thereafter correcting invoices are costly both time- and money-wise.
Project Managers and Team Leads Flying Blind
Without a real-time view of hours worked, project budgets were hard to manage, and overbooked team members led to project delays.
The administrative burden was massive—manually fixing errors took hours every week. Worse, revenue was leaking due to missing billable hours. The company needed a smarter way to track time without burdening team members or risking financial accuracy.
More than 300+ team- and project-leads, we estimated at least 2 hours per person per month, and at least 15 minutes per team member per week - that sums up to roughly 20’000 hours per year for 1400 team members all in. Depending on your average hourly rate, that brings you anywhere between $800k to $1.2M in costs.
-
Sascha Wadenpohl, Chief Delivery Officer at TIMETOACT GROUP
Integrating Tempo Timesheets with SAP wasn’t just a technical upgrade - it was a step-change towards operational excellence and enabling our group-companies to jointly deliver value to our customers.
The Solution: A Seamless Worklog Integration Between Tempo for Jira Cloud and SAP
To solve these challenges, TIMETOACT GROUP built a smart, automated integration between Tempo Timesheets and SAP, ensuring every worklog flows seamlessly from employees to payroll and invoicing - without manual intervention.
How It Works:
Employees log time once - in Tempo Timesheets in Atlassian Cloud
Data automatically syncs with SAP and the group HR Tool Personio, categorizing time for payroll, invoicing and overtime.
/ms-teams-logo.png?width=50&height=47&name=ms-teams-logo.png){kind=logo}
Microsoft Teams notifications alert employees and project managers of:
- Incorrect worklogs upon creating them.
- Overbooking when project hour limits are reached.
Thus, allowing a continuous correction of worklogs
The Tempo Timesheets integration into M365 Calendar, Slack, Structure, VS Code, Gitlab, Github, Bitbucket, Chrome, Firefox and Jira of course, keep track of what you are working on during the day, and fill your timesheet with worklog suggestions. These can be converted easily into worklog. Tempo Timesheet approvals complete the process.
In sum, logging work became a lot simpler and adapted to most of your team member characters - the immediate- and the end-of-the-week-loggers. Team Members, Team Leads and Project Managers save time as they can fix and correct worklogs as they occur.
The Benefits: Financial Precision and Time Savings at Scale
Conclusion: Turning Time Into Revenue with Smart Integrations
By integrating Tempo Timesheets with SAP, TIMETOACT GROUP turned an inefficient, error-prone process into an well-oiled process and financially precise system - and frankly, most of the time-tracking monsters are looking for a new job .
At this point, a big thank you for the great teamwork and the great products that make all this possible:
- Atlassian with Jira
- Tempo with Tempo Timesheets
- Personio as our global HR tool
- TIMETOACT for the development of the middleware
- Walldorf Consulting for support with the correct integration into SAP
- .... and of course our catworkx team for the configuration and onboarding work for our colleagues 💐
