Customer story
For 13 years, Good Apple relied on manual timesheets that made it difficult to identify which work streams employees were spending the most time with. Ahead of 2026, Good Apple’s CEO and founder asked to modernize internal operations with AI capabilities. Director of HR Operations Elise Cangemi set out to find a solution that did far more than simply record hours. She wanted a platform that would streamline administration, pinpoint time-consuming workflows ripe for automation, and protect people from burnout.
“It’s very rare to hear someone be like, ‘Oh my god, I love a time tracking platform.’ But it’s crisp and it’s clean and it feels up to date.”
The Challenge
Good Apple’s legacy platform required entirely manual inputs. Piecing the week back together from emails and calendars was tedious, and dedicated employees frequently absorbed extra hours without realizing it.
Without granular visibility into where those hours actually went, operational gaps persisted across the agency:
Leadership had limited insight into which recurring tasks and campaign processes absorbed the most internal effort.
Without task-level data, it was impossible to pinpoint repetitive manual routines that could be eliminated with automated tools.
Spotting team members who were chronically overextended meant pulling separate reports and manually building pivot tables.
Discipline leads and managers had to ask HR Ops every time they wanted to view their own team’s bandwidth.
“Agency life can be really hard. People burn out very quickly. Working for a company that recognizes that and is giving back to its employees has helped us retain some really strong talent.”
The Solution
Elise evaluated a handful of tools, but while others only solved parts of the problem, Timely brought time tracking, capacity management, and self-serve reporting together in one place.
With AutoSheet, Timely’s AI-powered automatic timesheets, employees no longer have to remember how they spent their day. Their work is captured automatically in the background and converted into drafts they can review and submit in one click.
Some employees initially worried that automated tracking meant leadership could monitor everything they did. Elise reassured them that their activity remained completely private until submitted. Within two months, attitudes shifted completely.
“I showed people you can erase, you’re in control of what you submit, and so I’m only seeing what you submit. So that was a really big thing for me.”
“I had people within the first month or two come to me and say, ‘I’m really sorry that I was kind of resistant to the change because it’s actually been a game changer for me.’”
The result
Capturing full internal hours across accounts has replaced rough task-based percentage estimates, giving leadership a much clearer picture of overall operational effort across clients.
“Now we’re actually able to see the true number of hours spent [on each task] every month. And so it gives us a much more realistic sort of net revenue per full-time equivalent (FTE) cost.”
Teams discovered that recurring campaign setups and manual reporting processes were eating up far more time than anyone realized.
When Good Apple's leadership reviewed Timely's workforce data, they uncovered just how frequently employees were going above and beyond to support the agency and its clients. In recognition of that extraordinary effort, the company awarded additional paid time off to employees as a one-time gesture of appreciation.
But the bigger opportunity was addressing what the data revealed. By identifying time-intensive, repetitive workflows and prioritizing them for automation, Good Apple is working to reduce administrative burden, improve efficiency, and give employees more time back (especially their weekends).
“Timely allows us to have more direct conversations with real data versus just a perception of ‘I work a lot.’ Everyone can say that, but having the data on hand has really helped.”
Capacity insights clearly distinguish whether an overloaded employee needs workflow optimization or whether project demands justify bringing on new hires. Historical project data also informs staffing estimates for incoming client accounts.
Employees create their own dashboards to track how their time is split across clients and projects, while team managers can access capacity reports instantly without waiting on HR Ops.
Over 5,000 businesses in 160 countries use Timely to track time automatically and run on real data.
