How we built one system that runs a whole firm

Timesheets in spreadsheets, copied by hand.

A detailing firm sells hours, so it has to know where every hour went.

Our client turns engineers’ designs into the shop drawings and models that steel fabricators build from. Its detailers work in offices in several countries, and most of what the firm sells is their time.

Before we started, timesheets were kept in spreadsheets and copied by hand into an old database. Managers could not see up-to-date figures when they had decisions to make.

One system, one login.

We built one system that every office uses, and moved years of past timesheets into it.

Work started in late 2022, and the reports followed through 2023. Everyone signs in to the same system, and everything sits on one set of records, so a figure entered in one office is the same figure everywhere else.

We moved the firm’s past timesheets in from the old database, so the history did not start again from zero. About 200 people have an account today.

Every hour lands against a budget.

Each hour is logged against a project, a zone of that project and a type of work.

A steel project is split into blocks and zones, and each zone gets a budget of hours for each type of work: modelling, detailing, editing, checking and so on. Staff log their time against those same zones and work types.

Each project has a gauge that shows hours used against hours planned, zone by zone, as the timesheets come in. Project managers can adjust a budget when the job changes, and the share of hours planned for support work is set per project.

Short hours reach the team leader.

A report is only as good as the timesheets behind it.

Each office has its own expected weekly hours. Every Monday, a summary of each team’s week goes to its team leader or office lead: who logged fewer hours than their office expects, by how many, and which entries used the wrong work code. A monthly summary follows on the first of each month.

Reports from the same hours.

The reports come straight from the timesheets, so nobody rebuilds them in a spreadsheet.

There are period and month to date reports, a quality report that sets rework hours against first-pass hours for each person and zone, a billing report and a report for each zone of a project. Each can be exported to Excel.

The same system holds the firm’s positions, courses, teams, leave and its organisation chart.

A private AI assistant, inside the same login.

In 2026 we added an assistant that answers staff questions from the firm’s own manuals.

Staff open it from the system they already use, with the login they already have. They ask how to do something and get an answer drawn from the firm’s training courses, manuals and software guides. Where a screenshot from a manual helps, the reply shows it, with the manual’s name and page number.

The assistant runs in the firm’s own cloud account, which the firm set up and pays for, and it answers from the firm’s own manuals rather than the open internet. A report in the system shows how many questions each person asked, how quickly the assistant replied and the AI usage behind it, by team and office.

Looked after since 2022.

When the firm needs something new, we add it to the same system.

Over the years that has added budget changes for project managers, a redesigned budget gauge, a new type of support work with its own codes, expected hours for each office, monthly summaries for team leaders, client job numbers that can be searched, and the assistant.