Tracking time spent on projects
A growing creative agency needed accurate time tracking for client billing and project forecasting — but manual time trackers weren't cutting it. By using WhatPulse Professional's Profiles feature, they gained seamless, per-project time insights with zero overhead for their team.
The challenge
Natalie Romero oversees a 25-person client delivery team at a busy creative agency in Denver. They juggle multiple client projects every week across design, copywriting, and campaign planning. Accurate time tracking is critical — not just for billing, but for forecasting capacity and evaluating project profitability.
Unfortunately, traditional time-tracking tools weren't working.
"We tried all the usual time tracking apps. People forget to start timers, stop timers, switch projects. We spent more time fixing timesheets than analyzing them." — Natalie Romero
What Natalie needed was a way to track how long employees actually worked on each project — automatically, without relying on their memory or discipline.
The solution: Profiles for seamless project-level tracking
The agency deployed WhatPulse Professional and Elgato Stream Deck devices across employee workstations and introduced the Profiles feature to track time per project.
Each project or client was set up as a Profile:
- Team members switch profiles when they start work on a different client
- WhatPulse automatically tracks which apps and how much time is spent under each profile
- Using the Stream Deck, employees can switch profiles with a single button press and instantly see which profile is active
After a quick training session, the team was up and running. Employees could easily switch between profiles for different clients and projects, and WhatPulse automatically tracked their time spent in each profile. WhatPulse allows easy export of time data for billing and reporting, so the team could easily generate reports for each client or project.
Key benefits:
- ✅ Accurate time spent per project, per team member
- ✅ App usage breakdowns within each project
- ✅ Effortless switching between client work
- ✅ Data export for billing and reporting
The analysis
After just a month:
- The team saw a 45% increase in project-level time tracking accuracy
- Billing discrepancies dropped by 70%
- Project managers were able to forecast bandwidth with greater confidence
- Underbudgeted projects were flagged earlier based on actual effort, not estimates
WhatPulse also helped Natalie's team spot patterns:
- Some clients were consuming double the expected time due to feedback loops
- Internal meetings were eating up more time than billable client work on Mondays
- Copywriters had longer tool usage ramps than designers, helping improve scheduling
The outcome
With WhatPulse Profiles, the agency:
- Simplified project tracking for every employee
- Reduced missed time entries and tracking errors
- Improved the accuracy of client invoicing
- Provided leadership with real-time insight into where team time was going
"We went from chasing people to log hours to just opening WhatPulse and seeing the truth. Profiles have become part of our process, not an extra step." — Natalie Romero
The takeaway
Manual time tracking is messy and unreliable. WhatPulse Professional's Profiles feature gives creative, service, and project-based teams:
- ✅ Effortless per-project time data
- ✅ Accurate forecasting and billing inputs
- ✅ A frictionless way to understand how time is really spent
Ready to simplify your project time tracking?