It’s tough to keep track of where your time goes at work. Flitting around between email to Excel to, well, Facebook during the nine-to-five happens. As hard as it is to admit, that behavior can eat away your efficiency and effectiveness. For companies, overpaying employees for their time spent on projects and misallocating internal resources can make for quite a blunder on your firm’s bottom line.
Enter Crisply, a self-proclaimed “quantified work” startup that recently relocated from New Haven, Conn. to Cambridge in early 2014. Using a powerful big data algorithm, the company aims to take the trouble out of the time sheet by using tech to tracks individual’s activities on computers and smartphones. Essentially, Crisply answers the plaguing question, “Where does my time go?”
“If you ask most people, whether they’re a freelancer or work at one of the largest companies in the world, they generally don’t know where their time goes at work,” Crisply Co-founder and CEO Ross Kudwitt told BostInno.
Not only does Crisply automatize how you track time to bill clients, but it also lets you know were that time is spent. After telling the program the different projects you’re working on, Crisply monitors all of your activity online by syncing up with a range of pre-configured applications like Gmail, Basecamp, Salesforce and Dropbox, among others. Have to hop on a conference call or head out for a client meeting? Just let Crisply know about the hold up, and it can factor those into account, too. The self-learning program then packages your workweek happenings into easy-to-read visualizations and a time sheet.
“It let’s you see all of your digital exhaust. Your emails sent, documents edited, websites visited and meetings in your calendar,” explained Kudwitt. But Crisply isn’t focused on exposing workers’ time spent procrastinating on the job, or browsing social media.
“In some companies, social media, Twitter and Facebook get classified as an effort,” Kudwitt points out. It’s not meant to be Big Brother-esque, but rather designed to help bring more visibility to individuals’ work patterns and provide managers with deeper insights to put towards resource planning and project tracking. “We’re quantifying things you do at work, and specifically not trying to quantify personal things,” explained the CEO.
For example, you can tell Crisply when you’re taking a personal call. That won’t get added into your timesheet because “it learns those statements are private,” said Kudwitt. Ultimately, the platform, which is currently in a beta-like stage, is completely customizable.
In addition to Kudwitt, the team consists of Adam Ferrari, the former CTO and chief software architect at Endeca, who serves as the startup's head of engineering. Adam Marcus, who Kudwitt calls a “math rockstar,” is Crisply’s chief scientist, and is a former professor at Yale. Additionally, former CIO at Terex Corporation Greg Fell takes up the role of chief strategy officer.
As of yet, there’s not a big marketing or sales push. Crisply is currently looking to hire engineers, and hasn't found a chief marketing officer. The users, however, are in the thousands and coming from around the world, said Kudwitt. The product is free for freelancers; for teams, pricing starts at $10 per user; and for enterprises, $20 per user. The company is current working out of the Cambridge Innovation Center.
