Get your time
organised

At Label305 we’ve always needed to track our time. As software engineers and consultants, it’s important for us to keep accurate track of every minute we spend working. This enables us to stay in control of our projects.

After using various time tracking solutions, we decided to create our own product for tracking the hours we work. We used our expertise to develop a SaaS-product for the self-employed and SMEs. A product that makes it possible to manage teams, projects, tasks, and most importantly, time in a user-friendly way.

Our aim is to enable every business that uses Keeping to achieve an increase in productivity by gaining greater insight in the way their time is spent. The way to do this is to develop a platform that works simply but efficiently, so that it really can become an integral part of a business.

• Product management
• UX and UI design
• SaaS product development
• Chrome extension and Firefox add-on
• Unique integration with external services

Developing a SaaS product that any business can use requires a delicate balance between UI, UX and technology. To achieve this, people with a range of different areas of expertise need to work closely together.

The interface needs to be simple so that time tracking stays quick and intuitive, while at the same time there need to be enough features to give meaning to the hours tracked in the interface.

To guarantee that the product will be widely used, it’s essential that it is available on all the major platforms. At the same time, no loss of quality can be accepted whilst achieving this availability.

To be suitable for both self-employed people and SMEs, Keeping needed to be developed in a scalable way. A self-employed person, a team of 4 people and a team of 500 people all need to be able to keep using time tracking in the same way without any concessions.

For our own product, Keeping, we do everything ourselves. There is no external client. We fulfil the role of inventor, product manager, designer, developer and support provider.

By sticking to the same agile working practices we use for our clients, we achieve a streamlined development with on time deliveries. Scrum and sprints form the basis for all development iterations of Keeping.

During development we focus on various parts of the software product in parallel. For example, we worked in parallel on the browser extension and on an improved version of the Android application. This created sub-projects within the main Keeping project, each with their own iterations.

Extensions and add-ons

Chrome and Firefox are among the most commonly used browsers worldwide. Developing a SaaS product like Keeping gave us the perfect opportunity to put our expertise with these browsers to good use.

To improve user experience, we thought of a way of integrating part of our time tracking product into the browser. This integration creates a unique experience for the user and makes important actions quickly accessible and easier to carry out.

Time tracking can be started from any page in the browser, so the user no longer has to visit the Keeping website. Everything is continually synchronised with Keeping so the time tracking you input via the browser is immediately available to view within every application.

Invoicing, project management and time registration go hand in hand thanks to the integrations of Keeping.

Track your hours directly within your favorite project management tools. And invoice effort from Keeping for a razor-sharp insight into the financial result of your work.

The integrations with external services serve to expand the availability of our product. This ensures a wide-ranging but unique user experience. The key focus here is consistently ensuring high-quality, so that using our SaaS product continues to be a pleasant experience.

For example, it’s important that every integration can be used in the same user-friendly way. References and time linked to external services also need to be consistently processed in Keeping in the same way.

For a Saas product such as Keeping, a clear, findable website and good support are just as important as the software itself.

In addition to the development of the various applications of Keeping, we set up the entire marketing,SEO optimized websiteand support team ourselves.

To support Keeping users quickly, there is an extensive knowledge baseon the website with numerous supporting articles.

For a positive, first introduction to Keeping, we have chosen to combine a modern business website with colorful and friendly graphics that have been developed in collaboration with an illustrator.

The result: a clear and expressive website that perfectly presents our product and helps Keeping users on their way quickly.

To create Keeping, we needed to bring together a wide range of technical expertise.

The Keeping web application was developed on the solid foundation of the Laravel-framework. Alongside this, essential frequently used interface components such as the ‘My hours’ overview were made with React, to enable a smooth interactive experience. Keeping also offers browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, written in TypeScript.

The mobile apps for Keeping were native written in Kotlin and Swift, for Android and iOS respectively. These apps make connection with the web application via an API, which can also be used by external developers.

Finally, Keeping runs on redundantly implemented cloud infrastructure supplied by DigitalOcean. We constantly monitor the health of the software product using external tooling such as: AppOptics, Bugsnag, Crashlytics and Pingdom. If a problem arises, we are able to take action immediately.

Creating products is something we do together with you as our client. If you have an interesting idea then get in touch with Olav to discuss your plans.