The timekeeping software Clear Build runs the business on.
cb-time is a small web application Clear Build wrote for itself. Narrative notes go in, structured billable entries come out, and the invoice is raised into the accounting package without anyone retyping it. None of it was commissioned by a client and none of it is client work.
- Sector
- Clear Build internal
- Engagement
- Built for the practice and used every day
- Result
- Five minutes to log a day's work, where about half an hour was needed by hand, both Clear Build estimates
A spreadsheet, a month-end reconstruction, and data that was thrown away.
Before it existed, time was kept in a spreadsheet and the invoice was assembled by hand at month end, with the usual reconstruction of what had actually been done for a client over the previous month.
The task-type data a practice builds up that way is lost, when it could feed learning, improvement and future estimating.
A diary that turns itself into an invoice.
A web application that records, like a diary, the tasks carried out on each client engagement, turns each narrative entry into structured billable line items, and raises the invoice into the accounting package.
Mike asks it for a time log covering the day's work on a given client and it proposes the log itself, because it already holds the context and the access needed to write one. A person verifies before anything is logged.
It runs as a live local service with a real database that keeps a revision of every entry, and a test suite behind it.
Both ends are estimates, and the page says so.
Clear Build estimates that logging a day's work by hand took about half an hour.
Clear Build's own estimate from running the practice. Not a timed study.
It now takes five minutes to log a day's work, on the same basis.
Clear Build's own estimate from running the practice. Not a timed study.
Used every day.
The tool is used every day and is the source the practice's daily engagement summary is generated from. A second release, tightening invoice integrity, went live in August 2026.
It is concrete and unglamorous, which is why it is here.