How a software engineering company increased efficiency with the help of EARLY

avocado is a software engineering house which builds apps for businesses across the German-speaking world. Simon Echle is the Managing Director.

The challenge: finding a way to efficiently and accurately bill clients

avocado was spending time manually tracking their time and needed to find a solution that was efficient and that could encourage the team to use it.

The solution: finding a way to track time that works for the whole team

The 12 person team tracks their time in different ways: some use the Tracker and others use the QuickTrack shortcut.

In order to fully adopt EARLY into their workflow, avocado needed to integrate it with their internal project management and issue-tracking tool on Redmine. Simon explains that they “needed to pool team member data together easily, according the client project being worked on.”

It was the task of one of the avocado engineers to connect the EARLY API, uniform the data and build a bridge into Redmine, a task which was completed with enthusiasm.

The team unifies their tracked activities according to client, and every comment captured in EARLY goes straight into clients’ reports. As a result, Simon often finds that clients are impressed by avocado’s transparency and level of detail and recommends EARLY to them, too. “Everyone benefits from time tracking that provides high-quality data.”

The result: time management transformed by data

Ultimately it’s the simplicity and flexibility of EARLY that keeps the avocado team coming back: “EARLY is easy to use. Manual tracking is significantly more effort,” comments Managing Director Simon Echle.

Despite starting using EARLY for billing purposes, Simon and his team have found their time management transformed by the data too.