Time tracking is the intranet killer app at BDO

Time is money, in particular when you work at an accountancy firm with billable hours as the key revenue stream. Still, how do you get employees to track their time regularly and make sure their time sheets are up-to-date?

At accountancy firm BDO Danmark, a part of BDO International, they have managed to turn time tracking into an intranet killer app by making the unusual decision to place it prominently on the intranet front page. In less than 6 months after launch, the average number of working days that were not time tracked were reduced by 50%!

I spoke to Lars Kjær, Manager - IT Development at BDO in Herning, Denmark, who shared additional details about this innovative intranet application which was initially launched on their intranet all the way back in 2004.

Previous challenges with time tracking

Before the launch of this business critical intranet application, the business process of tracking time at BDO Denmark was very different from the browser-based interface of today: Employees would log onto the ERP system and use an interface that in the views of many employees was cumbersome to use and required entering specific codes to track time.

Even for the IT professionals among the accountants at BDO, this required some training and some getting used to. While time tracking was also crucial for billing back in 2004 and earlier, it was far from as accurate and up-to-date as one could hope for, as many employees were dragging their feet on the time tracking.

How BDO used the intranet to turn time tracking into a more popular chore

When the project was initiated back in 2004, the very first objective was to make it much easier to track time by building a simpler web-based interface to handle tracking and approvals.

To further motivate employees they decided to make an updated snapshot of the time reports for each team visible directly on the intranet front page.

The screen shot to the right, basically shows the right column of the BDO intranet home page. Labelled BDO Tid ("BDO Time"), you see the fictitious status for April 2012. The graph shows that on this team, 2 employees are marked with red which indicates that they are behind on their time tracking.

Intranet time tracking behind the scenes

The actual time tracking application is built as an ASP.NET webapp, which is then inserted into the Microsoft SharePoint-based intranet.

Back in 2004, BDO was using SharePoint 2003 and the initial development was done in-house and took about a month of work in total, including development, testing and deployment.

Since then several improvements have been implemented and SharePoint has also been upgraded to 2010.

Learn more about intranet killer apps

You can several examples of innovative and popular intranet applications among other J. Boye group members, including:

• Arla made their intranet more social
• Judge Group did an intranet redesign and got a fat footer
• Nordea People Book
• Perkins Eastman uses the intranet to help people

Next steps for your intranet

• Learn from the best: Not yet registered for the intranet conference track at J. Boye Aarhus 12? Then secure your ticket today!
• Share with the best: Intranet killer applications are often discussed – and compared! – in our many J. Boye intranet groups across Europe and North America.
• How does your intranet measure up? We’ll tell you as part of our intranet benchmarking!