Case studies
How Coupler.io helped no-code agency XRay.Tech to track and analyze their time
Industry
Data consultancy
What we did
Data automation
Outcomes
50 mins per client saved
Industry
Data consultancy
What we did
Data automation
Outcomes
50 mins per client saved
Problem
As no-code automation specialists, the team at XRay.Tech is dedicated to saving time by eliminating tedious, robotic tasks. Over the last two years, we’ve saved hundreds of hours each month for our clients as we help them to streamline their workflows.
However, we’re not only focused on saving time for our clients; at XRay, we also build automations to support our team internally.
While there are already many SaaS tools available to help teams track time, we wanted to use a system that would promote a more mindful approach.
Rather than just running a digital stopwatch whenever they’re working, we wanted to encourage our team to proactively set an intention before they start a task.
Using Google Calendar and the XRay Workflow Dash (our own software), our team members can just click on a button to schedule a block of time on their calendar. Different buttons correspond to different projects and lengths of time.Later, each team member can edit their calendar events’ descriptions to give more detail about what they were working on.
This system encourages our team to plan their days and focus on one project at a time, rather than switching around reactively and losing focus.
However, Google Calendar obviously isn’t an ideal platform to study and analyze the resulting data. To get some meaningful insights into our time tracking system, we needed to move the data into an app like BigQuery.
“Coupler.io quickly became an essential part of our time tracking workflow, enabling us to automatically import our data into BigQuery for thorough and insightful analysis. With Coupler.io, we don’t have to do any extra manual work to get essential insights, and our new time tracking system saves us nearly 50 minutes per client on billing.
Solution
Before we can import our calendar data into BigQuery, we sync every event with an Airtable base using another database synchronization app. Then, at the end of each day, we’ve configured a Coupler.io importer to automatically add the latest data from Airtable to BigQuery.
This one simple import with Coupler.io enables us to view a wealth of analytics and insights. Once our data is in BigQuery, we can visualize where our team members spend their time based on nearly any parameters.
We can see which clients and projects get the most of our time, and compare that to a baseline average. We can see how much time is spent on a client on any given day or week, and correlate any spikes with specific tasks or projects that took extra work.
Importing the time tracking data in BigQuery with Coupler.io also lets us see how our team members are using the time tracking tool itself. We can see whether our team is scheduling their time in advance, or logging their schedules at the end of the day.
With the data in BigQuery as a guide, we’ve been able to make several key decisions to optimize the way we do work at XRay. Instead of spending nearly an hour per client on preparing hourly billing statements, we were able to accomplish the task in just ten minutes. Even more importantly, the data clearly showed us that hourly projects were not an effective use of our time, so we switched exclusively to membership and project-based billing models.
Having all of our time clearly laid out in BigQuery showed us which projects were consuming the most of our time, and which could use a little more attention. It’s helped us to keep our workloads balanced as we devote roughly equal time to each client, and it prompted us to move on from certain clients that consistently demanded too much of our day.
With Coupler.io, we don’t have to do any extra work or manual tasks to get these insights; we can just check BigQuery periodically to see the latest data automatically imported.
No-code automation platforms like Coupler.io are an excellent resource for building custom tools that fit unique workflows. At XRay.Tech, we wanted to develop a deep understanding of how our team spends time, and the existing tools didn’t cut it for us.
Without Coupler.io we would have been stuck manually importing data, making our system much more burdensome and less useful. By automatically performing a small but critical step, Coupler.io has empowered our team to make key decisions based on how we spend our time.
Tools & technologies
Data sources
