We were spending more time managing our team than doing the actual work
A few months ago, our team kept running into the same problem.
The work itself wasn't the issue.
The issue was trying to answer simple questions every day:
- Who's working today?
- Who's on break?
- How many hours has everyone logged?
- Is the team actually on schedule?
The information existed, but it was scattered everywhere—spreadsheets, WhatsApp messages, different tools, and manual updates.
As the team grew, we realized we were spending more time chasing updates than focusing on the actual business.
So we decided to build a solution for ourselves.
That eventually became Trackly.
Trackly is a lightweight platform for managing the following:
- Attendance
- Work hours
- Break tracking
- Team visibility
- Productivity insights
- GPS check-ins/Check-out
We're still early, but we've finally reached the stage where we're comfortable sharing what we're building publicly.
Over the next few weeks, we'll be sharing:
- What we've learned while building as a team
- The mistakes we've made
- How we're thinking about distribution and growth
- The feedback we get from early users
I'm curious:
How are you currently managing attendance and team visibility?
Are you using spreadsheets, a dedicated tool, or some internal system you've built?
I'd genuinely love to hear how others are solving this problem and learn from the community.
This usually means the management overhead is coming from re-explaining context, not from the actual coordination — new people (or even existing ones) keep asking "why are we doing it this way" because that answer isn't written anywhere. Worth auditing: how many of your check-ins/Slack messages this week were re-explaining a decision vs. making a new one? If it's mostly re-explaining, that's a documentation gap, not a management gap.
(Full disclosure — I'm building Rootr partly because of this exact pattern on my own team.)
Accountability versus surveillance cannot be only a positioning line. Default to check-in coordinates, not continuous location history; show employees exactly what was captured, how long it stays, who can see it, and how to correct an error. If visibility is the product, that visibility should be symmetric.
This is a really thoughtful point, and I completely agree that visibility should not come at the cost of trust.
When we started building Trackly, the problem we wanted to solve wasn’t “how do we monitor employees?” it was “how do teams get a clear picture of what’s happening without constantly chasing updates?”
Throughout the build, we’ve been very intentional about keeping that balance in mind. Things like what information is collected, how it’s presented, and making sure visibility helps both managers and employees stay aligned have been important considerations for us.
The goal is to reduce confusion around attendance, schedules, availability, and daily operations , not create a feeling of being watched.
Appreciate you bringing up the transparency side of this. It’s exactly the kind of feedback that helps shape the product as we continue building. Would love to hear more about how you think teams can best maintain that balance.
Make the balance inspectable, not aspirational. At check-in, show the exact fields captured, retention window, and who can see them; then give employees the same timeline plus a way to correct a bad record. Track correction rate and manager overrides. If those rise, the system is creating distrust even while attendance data looks cleaner.
This hits close to home. I run a software company, a care home, and a cafe, and "who's working today, who's on break" is a daily question in at least one of those at all times. The scattered-spreadsheets-and-WhatsApp version of this doesn't just cost time, it costs a specific kind of attention, you end up holding the tracking in your head as a backup in case the tool missed something. I built FounderFlow to deal with my version of that noise. Right now I mostly track spreadsheets plus a shared calendar for the care home shifts, and honestly it's held together by habit more than process, so genuinely curious how Trackly handles the GPS check-in piece without it feeling like surveillance to the team.
Thanks for sharing this, and I can totally relate. The “tracking in your head because the tool missed something” part is exactly the problem we wanted to solve.
For GPS check-ins, our focus is more on visibility and accountability rather than surveillance. Teams can see where and when check-ins happen, especially useful for field teams or distributed teams, while keeping the process simple for employees.
We’re still improving based on real-world feedback, so your perspective from managing different operations is actually valuable.
I’d be happy to show you how we’ve designed it in a quick 5–10 min walkthrough if you’re open to it. Would love to get your thoughts as well.
Appreciate the detailed answer, and the visibility-vs-surveillance distinction makes sense. Juggling a few different operations myself, I get why founders want that without it feeling like monitoring. I'll pass on the walkthrough for now, but wishing you luck with it.
What part of your approval process takes the most time? Trying to understand if this is a universal pain.
For us, the biggest delay wasn't approvals themselves, it was simply getting accurate, real-time visibility into who was working, on leave, or on break. We found that a lot of time was being spent chasing updates across different channels instead of making decisions.