CY Architecture: architecture firm


Hey Christoph, tell us a bit about your company.
I own a small architecture firm in Vienna with my partner (in life and business) Yvonne. We started the company out of a shared love for architecture and the desire to perfect our work/life balance. We work together on everything from classical architecture to open space and interior design, bringing people in-house to work with us on different projects.
What brought you to the world of time tracking?
We were looking for a tool to help organize and structure our work, and manage profitability. We needed to see exactly how we used our time to understand what projects are actually worth the investment, in addition to tracking project hours accurately for billing. Since we often work with external collaborators, we also needed a way to capture their time in our workflows.
So why did you pick Timely for the job?
I was drawn to the fact it works automatically, which is great for improving productivity company-wide. I played around and found it really fun to use, which encouraged the whole team to use it. I was also impressed that Timely is flexible and can scale with us as we grow, which we'll definitely need as we bring more employees on board.

What does your team like most about the tool?
The simple interface and the Memory tracker feature, which automatically records everything we work on. It lets us easily tailor our workflows, so tracking project budgets with different consultants is really simple. Timely is working amazingly for us – it’s simply the best time tracking app I’ve tried so far.

Would you mind showing how you organize project work in Timely?
We use tags to separate essential business management tasks (e.g. accounting, marketing, meetings, customer support etc.):

As well as for different project phases, which we bill for separately:

We also use color coding to instantly show billable (blue) against non-billable (red) work from our Week view:

How do architects blow off steam outside the office?
I can’t speak for everyone, but Yvonne and I both love the outdoors and going climbing!