Six Hours a Week Back, and a Field Sales App Live in Two Weeks

This is a story about paper. Specifically, about six hours a week that an agricultural business was losing to it, and what happened when we took it out of the process. If you run a business where people work away from a desk and their hours end up on a bit of paper, this one is for you.

The problem

Field workers recorded their hours on paper. That is how it had always worked, and on the face of it there is nothing wrong with it. The problem was what happened next.

Every week someone in the office collected the sheets, worked out what they said, and typed them up. That took around six hours. Six hours of a skilled person’s week spent re-typing numbers that someone else had already written down.

And every one of those re-typed numbers was a chance to get something wrong. Not through carelessness. That is simply what happens when information is copied from one place to another by hand.

What we built

We built FieldTime, a time-keeping app the field team uses on their phones. The person who did the work records it, at the time they did it. Nobody re-types anything.

It covers what the business actually needs rather than what a generic timesheet tool assumes. Time entries against customers. Off-sick records that prompt for whether it happened at work and whether the accident book has been filled in. Fuel logs. An audit trail. The office pulls the data out as a spreadsheet instead of deciphering handwriting.

The small decisions matter more than the big ones. Sessions last a full week, for example, because field workers should not be logged out overnight and locked out of their own timesheets at seven in the morning. You only learn that by paying attention to how people actually work.

What changed

• Six hours a week back. The office no longer spends its week typing up paper timesheets. That time now goes on work that actually needs a person.
• Fewer errors. Hours are entered once, at source, by the person who worked them. Remove the re-typing step and you remove the mistakes that came with it.
• No more paper. The sheets are gone entirely. Less waste, and nothing to lose, smudge or leave in a jacket pocket.

Then the field sales app

They also had an idea for a field sales app. They had tried to build it themselves on Lovable and could not get it over the line. This is common and it is not a failure on their part. Getting something working on screen is one problem. Getting it live, secure, and connected to real data is a different one.

We took the idea and had it live in two weeks. It is still being developed, because once a tool is genuinely in people’s hands they start seeing what else it could do.