How a marketing team saves hours every month with EARLY

Ricardo Hödebeck is a marketing manager at aletto Hotels, which belongs to the avanca Corporation. His team provides marketing services for the aletto Hotels in Berlin and also for the other companies, which include logistics and bio-LNG companies.

The challenge: tracking time across different projects and departments

The team’s work includes graphic design, PR, social media and marketing services. As Ricardo and the team work like an agency across several businesses under the avanca Corporation umbrella, they need an easy way to see exactly how much time they are spending across different departments for each company so that they can keep track of how much budget each has used.

Not wanting to waste their time with inaccurate spreadsheets, they needed a time tracking tool that would enable them to easily see how they were spending their time and create reports to share with management. One of Ricardo’s friends recommended EARLY to him and the team quickly got set up.

“I was worried that the team wouldn’t be satisfied using EARLY, but they were really happy from the start as they love being able to see how much time they’ve worked and how their time contributes to the total worked across the team. It’s not just interesting for management, but for the employees too.”

The solution: using EARLY to maintain an even spread across projects

The aletto team uses EARLY with the Time management cube and have assigned each company they work with to each side. Ricardo and his team love the different colors available in EARLY, the user-friendly interface and how easily they can switch between activities with just a flip of the device.

They are able to quickly and easily track how much time they spend using tags and mentions. The marketing team also uses Asana. They connect the task they have in Asana to the tag in EARLY, further saving them time.

Every month the team pulls a report to check how their time has been divided across projects and companies. At the end of the year, they use EARLY’s insights to get an overview of the year and identify ways to maintain an even spread across their projects and create a strategy for going forward.

The solution: time optimisation and easy invoicing

Being able to easily see who worked on which projects and for how long enables the team to understand how they can optimize their time going forward.

As the team works like an agency, it’s important that they can easily see how much of the budget the work for each company has used up. Ricardo finds it helpful being able to see an individual’s overview and insights, as well as those of the team.

“Using EARLY, a time management software for marketing agencies, saves several hours a month for each employee, which really adds up across the team.”

Ricardo explains that EARLY’s clear statistics enable him to plan a fair distribution of time resources across the companies they support. 

“The data and insights provided by EARLY are invaluable. I have the information I need in seconds, which makes it really easy when it comes to invoicing. The export options are fantastic and make it quick and simple to extract the information I need.”

The aletto marketing Team love using EARLY as it’s “clean and easy to handle, whereas other methods are much more difficult to use. EARLY has a lovely, friendly design and it’s easy to use.”