Managing Team Resources

The Result

• 90% Reduction in Client updates: The time required to update client was reduced from hours down to minutes, freeing up executive staff for high-value activities.

• Significant Time Savings: Eliminating manual spreadsheet maintenance and integrating time logging saved the each team member approximately 8 hours per month in pure administrative effort.

• Instant Resource Visibility: Executives gained the ability to conduct resource planning in minutes, using centralized data to avoid staff overload and ensure equitable workload distribution.

• Empowered Team Members: Staff gained a simple, dedicated web application (Softr) for daily time tracking, eliminating the need to navigate complex backend systems or disparate Excel files.

The implementation delivered immediate, quantifiable results by dramatically slashing administrative time and providing the centralized clarity needed for strategic resource allocation.

The Challenge

• Excel Chaos & Data Silos: Critical operational data (client info, service offerings, hours, and staff assignments) was scattered across more than 10 disconnected Excel sheets. This made collaborative work tedious and reliable reporting impossible.

• Wasted Executive Time: Onboarding a new client required administrative staff to spend two full hours updating spreadsheets, files, and contact lists—a non-revenue task that slowed down business velocity.

• Invisible Resource Allocation: Managers lacked a single, transparent view of who was assigned to which client offerings, making strategic resource planning opaque and prone to overloading team members.

• Inefficient Time Logging: The administrative burden of tracking and logging time was disconnected, costing staff approximately 2.5 hours per week in purely administrative tasks that detracted from billable client work.

The cumulative time expenditure per applicant approached 30 minutes, introducing significant process latency, variability in documentation standards, and a non-negligible risk of human error.

Services led to an operational bottleneck. The manual overhead required to manage clients and allocate resources became a major constraint on their growth and profitability.

The Solution

• Technical Architecture:

  • Airtable for Admin/Executive: The centralized back-end database for all clients, service offerings, costs, contacts, and staff details (The Single Source of Truth).

  • Softr Team for Members/Managers: A custom-built, secure web application interface that allows filtered, simplified access for daily work (Time Logging and Client View).

The core innovation was using Softr to create a custom, simplified web interface. This allowed team members to log time and manage their clients without ever having to touch the complex, sensitive backend data residing in Airtable.

We eliminated the need for multiple documents by engineering a secure, two-part platform that separates high-level administration from daily team operations, all while using flexible, low-code tools.

Operational Flow

The new system unifies the executive control with front-line efficiency, ensuring that everyone works with the right data in the right tool.

1. Executive Data Setup (Airtable): The Administrator enters all key data (Client Info, Service offering Details, Staff Profiles) into the central Airtable database. This instantly enables resource allocation visibility for the executive.

2. Team Member Daily Work (Softr Portal): Staff log in to the dedicated Softr web application. They only see the clients and service offerings to which they are explicitly assigned. Time logging is done directly within the portal, with hours instantly writing back to the Airtable database.

3. Real-Time Tracking: The integrated system automatically tracks all logged hours against the client's purchased Service offering limits, calculating the financial metrics (Revenue, Margin) in real time.