How Big Sky Care Connect Tracks Time Across Multiple Grant Funders with Toggl (Without Adding to Anyone's Workload)

About

Big Sky Care Connect (BSCC) is a nonprofit health information exchange, founded in 2018 to help hospitals, clinics, providers, insurers, and public health agencies share and make sense of healthcare data. A period of sudden growth, driven by expanding work with state and federal partners, has created a need to track staff time across multiple grants, funders, and partner-billing arrangements, without slowing anyone down. Cass Staton, a Program Manager, led the initial rollout; Matt Graham, VP of Finance and Administration, was part of the leadership team that evaluated tools and brought years of hands-on time-tracking experience to the decision, along with a finance and compliance lens to how the data gets used.

Results with Toggl

• Captures more complete, accurate time data because tracking is simple enough that staff actually keep up with it
• Reports the same time data by funder, project, or team — without asking staff to track any differently
• Supports the monthly direct-hour accounting a grant-funded pilot project requires, and gives Finance the granularity to price partner integration work
• Flexible data structure, with support from a Customer Success Manager to set it up correctly from the get-go
• Automatically logs recurring meetings to the right project
• Building toward a real-time view of team capacity, to help catch overload before it turns into burnout

"Since we've switched, we're seeing much better capture of how people are spending their time, because it's easier for people to accurately track their time. And that leads to better compliance."

— Cass Staton, Program Manager at Big Sky Care Connect

One pay cycle in, reporting is already working the way Finance needs it to: "Our finance director handles the granular reporting — she got everything she needed this cycle and sent it to our payroll vendor. We expect that manual work to shrink over the next couple of cycles as we get more familiar with the reports," said Matt.

Challenges

Like a lot of nonprofits juggling multiple grants and funding streams, BSCC needed to see time along more than one dimension — who's the funder, and what's the project — without piling more process onto a team that includes plenty of non-technical staff. The stakes were concrete: BSCC runs a pilot project that requires a monthly accounting of hours worked directly on it, on top of indirect costs.

"We have to have a monthly accounting for how many hours we're directly spending on that project, as well as indirect costs. We could handle the indirect the way we were doing things, but the direct was challenging," said Matt Graham, VP of Finance and Administration at BSCC. Sorting it out was one of his first priorities after joining: "This was one of my top three priorities as soon as I joined," he said.

Before Toggl, BSCC tracked time with another tool, in just seven broad categories.

"Our previous tool was fairly rudimentary. It's not bad — just, for what we want to do, it's insufficient," said Matt. "The previous tool we were using required more of a manual entry, and it was a little cumbersome for our staff members. On the admin side, if we wanted to add new projects, we had to request that," added Cass Staton, Program Manager at BSCC.

Matt and the team evaluated five or six alternatives before landing on Toggl. None were quite the right fit — some felt clunky and expensive for what they offered. Internal testing sealed it: "When we tested it with our programmers and developers, they said it was a lot better than the other tools we looked at," said Matt.

Solution

BSCC organizes projects around funders and functional areas rather than clients in the traditional sense — internal work, platform operations, and services performed on behalf of partners or funders — then uses a custom field to tag each project with a funder behind the scenes.

A funder field that stays out of the way

"The biggest feature that we like about Toggl is the custom fields. It allows us to attach a funder from the admin side to any project. Our staff don't really see that when they're tracking time but it allows us that other dimension, when we want to look at how time is being allocated and how that matches up with the different funding sources," said Cass.

Two teams, one deciding factor

BSCC's technical team wanted a Jira integration to manage their own project work — and independently, it turned out to be the deciding factor on the finance side too. "One of the things we were excited about with Toggl was the Jira integration — that was one of the primary drivers why we ultimately moved to Toggl," said Matt.

Billing funders and pricing partner work, down to the dollar

As both a consumer and provider of healthcare data, BSCC also has to price the work of keeping its data connections current. "When a partner changes their systems, we have to rebuild the interface, which costs us real money. If a hospital system changes their electronic health records, it's going to cost us a few thousand dollars to change that interface — we need to be able to scope that out and charge for it," said Matt. The same funder-level granularity that supports staff-facing reporting gives Finance what it needs to justify those costs and account for other grant-funded work.

Landing on a structure that actually fit

Getting the project structure right took real thought because BSCC had more than one valid way to organize the same data, and needed it to work for every stakeholder who'd rely on it.

"It was very easy to see different ways we could have chosen to structure our projects. But once we worked through that and settled on it — and Larissa, our Customer Success Manager, was upfront that this was the most important thing to get right — it flowed from there very easily," said Cass. Looking back, she sees it as time well spent: "It was a valuable exercise for us. We had to figure it out ourselves, with our different internal stakeholders, to make sure it met all of their needs."

Self-serve admin, without waiting on a vendor

Once the structure was set, BSCC could build and maintain it themselves — including retiring projects as funding phases close out.

"In our old program, we had to ask for new projects to be added to the structure. It's really nice that we can go in ourselves and add things as they become necessary," said Cass. She isn't a technical person herself, and didn't need to be: "I think anyone with a reasonable level of comfort navigating computer programs would be able to walk themselves through setting up a project structure."

One less manual step for recurring meetings

During rollout, BSCC's team asked whether recurring meetings could auto-code to a project — and found out Toggl's automation rules support just that.

"We had a request for being able to automatically code calendar entries to projects, and it was really great to see how to set rules within Toggl for recurring meetings to automatically track to a timesheet," said Cass.

Rolling out without friction

BSCC launched Toggl at a staff meeting, gave the team a three day period to explore it before anything hit official timesheets, and went live the following week.

"No one was really in love with our previous tool, so they were ready to change," said Cass.

Since the switch, the team has settled in well. "Our staff are happy with it. They're able to accurately and quickly track their time," she said — and when asked about feedback, she pointed to the absence of complaints as its own signal: "No news is good news on the technical side. The tool is working for people. If they were unhappy with it, or it was hard to navigate, I'd be hearing a lot about it." Matt's read, a cycle into finance's own rollout, was similar: "Everyone seems to be very happy with it."

Watching workload without watching the clock

Matt uses the data day to day, in conversations about his own team's growth: "I can use [time tracking data] as an additional data point when I'm advocating for someone — it's not time tracking in isolation." And, fully remote by design, BSCC is deliberate about what the data is for: "We're not trying to be Big Brother. We're just trying to watch the ebbs and flows to make sure we're staffing in the right ways, in the right places," Matt said.

Looking ahead

BSCC came to Toggl to solve a time-tracking and funder-reporting problem — and in the process, found a platform with more to offer than what they set out looking for. Next up is deploying the Jira integration for the technical team, refining a supervisor time-approval workflow to match BSCC's new bi-monthly pay cycle, and — on the finance side — using the same cost data to evaluate a future multi-state shared services platform.

Both Cass and Matt point to the same next horizon: capacity. "I would say we're underutilizing Toggl right now, but we think we're going to grow into some of those features," said Cass. "I could see a time where, from a leadership standpoint, we're looking at different teams and saying: do these people have capacity? Are they over capacity? I think that feature is going to be really important to us in the future."

Matt, who has managed capacity planning on larger teams before, frames it the same way from the other side of the org chart: "We have some very specialized folks on our team, and the concern is: do we know what they're working on? We want [someone] to stay around, but if she's burning really hot — 60-hour work weeks that no one loves — we've got to get her some support fast before she leaves. We need to crawl before we can walk, but we believe Toggl will be a solution we can grow into."

For Cass, the appeal of Toggl still comes down to how little it asks of the people using it: "I would say the biggest benefit of Toggl is that it's intuitive — from the staff member standpoint and the admin experience. Both as a staff member and as an admin, you have a lot of control." Matt's early verdict from the finance seat: "It's been a great experience so far, and we look forward to a long partnership."

A good fit for organizations tracking time across multiple funders and partner obligations — simple enough for staff, granular enough for compliance and billing, and flexible enough for admins.