Hasan & Co: creative agency group

We are now producing much more accurate timesheets...for more honest client billing and transparent company reporting.

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Hey Oskari! Tell us a bit about what you do at Hasan & Co. 

We are an international group of creative agencies and brand specialists based in the Nordics. Roughly 95 of us are based in Finland, across hasan & partners, Frankly Partners and h&p Design, and a further 30 of us work in Sweden at Perfect Fools. We help brands nurture and enhance powerful relationships with their customers leveraging our expertise in brand storytelling, communication, design, behavioural strategy and digital experiences. 

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How does time tracking support your creatives?

It’s a mixture of managing project profitability, balancing team resources and ensuring our employees enjoy a healthy working life with us. We need time tracking to capture total employee working hours and possible flex time, which allows teams to manage capacity across weeks and months. Aside from helping supervisors report on utilization rate, this helps to protect employees from overworking.

We also need time tracking to ensure project profitability. By capturing every hour that goes into each project, we can follow project budget spend to proactively manage the return of our work. If we see that we will likely go over estimated hours for a project, for example, we can try to have an early discussion with a client to potentially increase scoped hours. Once a project is completed, we can also use all project hours to calculate better project base hourly rates for future projects.   

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Ease and enjoyment of use really separated Timely from other time tracking tools. It's just so easy to log hours.

What made you choose Timely for managing project profitability and employee hours?

Ease and enjoyment of use really separated Timely from other time tracking tools. It’s just so easy to log hours. Employees particularly liked that Timely offers a range of different ways to log hours, from manually entering notes and using a timer, to dragging automatically captured work activities to their timesheet or approving Timely’s AI draft time entries. It gives everyone the freedom to select the method that is easiest for them.

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Our teams also appreciated Timely’s mobile app for logging time on the go, as well as its native integrations. Timely’s calendar integrations are especially useful; most of our people keep their Google Calendars up-to-date, and Timely can automatically pull in planned calendar events to minimize effort when logging time on meetings.

More personally, as an Admin user I love how easy it is to notify people that there are gaps in their timesheets – it really reduces the time I spend simply managing timesheet compliance. I also like how easy it is to open and close projects – Timely’s small UI touches really help to keep tool admin to a minimum.  

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People actually enjoy using Timely... [It's] enabled us to streamline the whole logging process.

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What’s the impact of that simplicity and flexibility? How has Timely materially helped your teams?

Time tracking is mandatory for everyone in our agencies, so it’s great that people actually enjoy using Timely. As a group, we also try to keep our timesheets up-to-date on a weekly basis, and Timely has enabled us to do so by streamlining the whole logging process.

We are now producing much more accurate timesheets which capture all the effort we put into our work, making for more honest client billing and transparent company reporting. Incredibly, Timely has also helped us change the culture around time tracking: instead of putting off timesheets or forgetting to log hours, everybody now logs their work promptly – from top management to admin personnel to creative planners. It’s just so light and easy. 

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Timely has helped us change the culture around time tracking...everybody now logs their work promptly.

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How do your agencies structure Timely for their work?

All our hours are logged to projects. We create projects for internal admin tasks and annual leave so all employee hours stay visible: 

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We then create projects for each individual piece of client work, which specific teams log hours to:  

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When creating client projects, we add a fixed time budget based on the total hours we agree with our clients. We then apply a universal hourly rate for all team members working on the project, although Timely does give you the option to add individual hourly rates too.

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