Improve Time Tracking Accuracy with a Custom AI Agent

Most professional services firms rely on tools like Harvest or Toggl. These tools are passive stopwatches. They depend entirely on a consultant's discipline to start and stop timers for every single task. In reality, a consultant jumps from a client call to a quick email to a Slack message. They forget to start the timer, and at 5 PM on Friday, they are left guessing, consistently under-billing by 10-15% just to be safe.

Project management platforms like Asana or ClickUp have built-in time logging, but this creates a different problem. The work happens in email, meetings, and chat, not in the project tool. A senior consultant might spend 45 minutes on a strategy call, then another 30 minutes writing a detailed follow-up email. They log the 45-minute call in Asana but forget the 30 minutes of email work, losing 0.5 billable hours because the work and the logging are in two different places.

The structural failure is that these tools are designed as static databases requiring manual input. They cannot actively observe where work is happening and infer billable activity. An agency with 10 consultants, each losing just 30 minutes of billable time per day, leaks over 1,200 billable hours a year. The problem is not the consultants; it is the friction and memory-dependence of the tools they are forced to use.

The engagement would begin with a 'signal audit' of your firm's daily workflow. Syntora connects to your core systems, typically Google Workspace, Slack, and a project tool like Jira, via read-only API access. We map which activities, like calendar events with external guests or messages in client-specific Slack channels, correlate to billable work. This audit produces a clear data map that defines the rules for the AI agent.

The technical approach uses a series of AWS Lambda functions, each one listening for events from a specific source. When a client meeting ends, a webhook triggers a function. This function passes the event metadata to the Claude 3 Sonnet API, which classifies the activity, drafts a description, and assigns it to the correct client project. The resulting JSON object is stored in a Supabase database, creating a queue of draft time entries for each consultant.

The delivered system is a simple, daily email digest or a lightweight web portal built with FastAPI. At the end of each day, every consultant receives a list of suggested time entries. They can approve them with one click or make minor edits. Approved entries are then pushed directly into your billing system, like QuickBooks or Xero. The entire daily process of logging time is reduced from 30 minutes of guesswork to a 5-minute review, with hosting costs under $50 per month.