How Toggl Track saves Talk Shop Media 80 hours a month on time tracking while improving operations

Advanced financial, account health reports in a visually appealing way

The key reason Talk Shop Media immediately chose Toggl Track was its advanced and visually appealing reports.

1. The agency now gets a complete snapshot of departments, accounts, and profitability, using a mix of Toggl Track reports: Financial end-of-month report. It provides insights into billing and profitability by detailing how much time Talk Shop Media employees track, how they are compensated, and how this translates to overall business health.

2. Detailed client-specific reports. These help McClenaghan and the operations side of the agency determine if they need to adjust billing for clients to keep charges fair and accurate. If a client retainer involves 22 hours of work a month, McClenaghan can quickly see how many hours have been used, the progress of a client project, and who is working on the account. This report also tracks the agency’s key KPI – billable vs non-billable work, which for junior-level employees is an 80:20 split.

3. Project dashboards for department heads. These dashboards allow department heads to see where their teams spend the most time and which accounts need more attention. For example, a department head can understand their group's time allocation and identify accounts that might need additional focus.

4. Team health report. The agency also tracks who is working excessive hours and where their time is spent to help alleviate burnout. Team health is critical, and with Toggl Track, Talk Shop Media quickly identifies and addresses these issues, maintaining productivity while safeguarding their team's wellbeing.

“Your time tracking data is only as valuable as the insights it provides. We've seen a significant improvement in reporting capabilities for account health, profitability, and employee well-being. These reports give us a broad business overview in one place, while allowing us to zoom into account, project, and even task-specific data in easily filterable dashboards,” McClenaghan said.

Saving up to 80 hours per month on time tracking

Ironically, tracking time with the agency’s previous solution, Function Point, took an enormous amount of time.

As McClenaghan recalls, the interface forced the team to log hours in a list view, resulting in a cumbersome list of 1,500 line items on a timesheet each week. This clunky experience hurt the team’s compliance.

“Before, we were chasing up to 15% of our workforce down to complete their timesheet and it was so time-intensive. When we switched to Toggl Track, people actually started tracking their time,” McClenaghan explains.

The key reason for improved compliance is the multiple ways to track time in Toggl Track. Flexibility is a core part of the agency's culture, so it needed a way for the team to track time in a way that suited their work style.

“The team tracks time through a browser extension, mobile app, desktop app, or web app. Additionally, the team is encouraged to choose the mode that works best for them – either using a play/stop timer or adding time entries manually. If they prefer, they can even use automated time tracking, letting the app track their laptop activities and convert them into time entries if employees want it,” McClenaghan said.

Other time-saving features the team loves include:

• 📅 Calendar view. Everyone’s Google Calendar is integrated with Toggl Track so they can turn any calendar event into a time entry with one click. It’s one of the key abilities that saves its team around 80 hours/month on time tracking

• 📍 Pin Favorite time entries. Workspace admins also pin Favorite time entries to keep time tracking accurate. Users can add a project, client, or tags to them, allowing each individual to easily restart the same entry repeatedly

The team also needed to track time in increments smaller than 15 minutes — a small but necessary feature that was cumbersome to manage with Function Point and, therefore not encouraged by the team.

“With Toggl Track, we solved this problem — we can track and edit time entries with precision, improving the accuracy of our time tracking data,” McClenaghan said.

System customizations and relationships that drive time tracking success

To truly leverage time tracking data, the team needed highly customized account profitability reports, which weren't available out of the box. For this, Talk Shop Media explained to Toggl’s Customer Success engineers what it needed and a custom solution was built. Now, the agency uses this custom Account Profitability report to compare a project's fixed fee with the tracked time and internal cost rates of those involved.

“Instantly, we can see which accounts are profitable and which aren’t. If profitability is low, we can dig deeper into the data and take the necessary steps. This custom report eliminates the need for manual data compilation. It’s all done automatically, with all our data available right in Toggl Track.” It’s not just the custom reports that Talk Shop Media is happy with — from their onboarding experience to continuous improvements, Toggl Track has set the agency up to maximize its full time tracking potential.

“The platform seems to constantly evolve and incorporate our feedback. I've also been really impressed with the attention we’ve been given throughout both the onboarding and ongoing process,” McClenaghan said.

“I have our customer success manager on Slack and he’s always available; telling me about new updates and things that are specific to our team. Whenever I have a question, he will respond and walk me through it. This is super impressive and helps us make the most out of our time tracking system.”