Tiny Time Keeper

The agency was paying four hundred dollars a month for a time tracking system that was buggy, slow, and indifferent to their feature requests. Staff still clocked in on paper. Admins still calculated hours in spreadsheets. Payroll was a weekly ordeal that no one looked forward to.

They needed it yesterday. I built it in two days.

Employees walk in and tap their PIN on a wall-mounted iPad. That’s it — they’re clocked in. The admin dashboard updates instantly. Managers see who’s working, who’s late, and who didn’t show up, all from their phone, in real time.

Usage grew 2.4x in fourteen weeks — thirty-two shifts per week to seventy-seven — because the system simply works. Timesheets generate themselves. Managers approve with one tap. Payroll exports match the agency’s existing spreadsheet format. Zero retraining. Zero resistance.

Built for multi-tenancy from day one. Any business can sign up, create an organization, and onboard their team. Stripe handles the billing lifecycle end to end. Infrastructure cost: zero dollars a month. The entire system runs on Vercel’s free tier.

Speed matters more than perfection — when someone needs a working system, they don’t need your ideal architecture. I shipped in two days. The architecture evolved over fourteen weeks of real usage. But the initial sprint proved the only thing that matters: it works, and no one has lost a single hour of data.

Real-time updates changed how managers interact with time tracking entirely. They went from checking attendance once a day to monitoring it continuously — not because I told them to, but because the live board is simply more useful than a report.

Five hundred thirty-seven tests on a time tracking app might seem excessive. It isn’t. Payroll errors cost real money and real trust. Every edge case — timezone transitions, overnight shifts, missed punches, overlapping events — is tested. Because the one time your system miscalculates someone’s hours is the last time they trust it.