These insights have one thing in common: you will never arrive at them unless you have reliable data. Which is actually pretty much doable if you run a goods-based business, where every transaction is processed digitally and stored in massive databases – be it facilitated by Google Analytics or an ERP system.

But if you’re running a sizable business that bills clients by the hour… A consultancy, a law firm, a software boutique, an ad agency, or any of the millions of other service businesses that use a pay-per-hour model… You’re in for a challenge.

The problem is that hours are worked by people, and that people aren’t robots, and aren’t plugged into a system. There’s no magic Javascript to aggregate their exact activities for you. Instead, in order to get any kind of data, your people will need to tell the system how they spent their time.

And people don’t like talking to systems. I experienced this firsthand, as the owner of a big web consultancy firm back in the 90s. We had 200 people and billed our 75 clients by the hour – so reliable time tracking google calendar data was paramount, if only to send out proper invoices. Yet gathering the data from our people was always a chore. In fact, it was a bigger challenge than most problems we solved for our clients.

We tried everything. At first, we used pink paper sheets. Nobody filled them in, they routinely got lost, and if they ended up at the right place they had to be entered manually. Then, we went the Excel route. We installed a complex structure of Excel-timesheets and automatic reminders on the intranet and hoped that people would log their time there – perhaps twice a day, but at least once.

The Excel experiment failed even more miserably than the pink paper one, and our COO had to use brute force to get some people to log even some of their time.

By now, I had grasped what we were up against: human laziness, human aversion to administrative work, and human unreliability. If our solution was too cumbersome to use, my people wouldn’t use it, at least not consistently. I now began to understand the business value of a tool that would work – even better, one that people would actually use happily, regularly, instead of intermittently, grudgingly. Because having some data was nice; but the benefits of having accurate, real-time data would be huge.

Of course, the issue is that nobody will log their time happily… Unless they benefit themselves. People need rewards; the more instantaneous the reward, the better.

This is the challenge we set ourselves when we started developing Yanomo. To create time tracking software that works from a deep understanding of the psyche of the people actually logging the hours. It’s why we integrated Google Calendar in our time tracking saas, why we made our product social, and why we’re introducing elements of gamification.

For more information visit http://www.yanomo.com/