Silva-Agro: how SmartTrack ended paper timesheets and broken Excel schedules

Silva-Agro OÜ is a diversified company based in Sangaste, Valga County, in southern Estonia: grain cleaning and transport, fertiliser and grain storage, trailer rental, the Silva Pood shop and the Sangaste Rukki Maja guesthouse. With that many lines of business, the hours spent on personnel admin grow quickly unless the system itself is in order.

Manager Kevin Allik shared why the company decided to replace hand-filled timesheets and Excel schedules, and why hours24 SmartTrack turned out to be the right fit.

Timesheets nobody filled in at the right moment

Before hours24, Silva-Agro used classic paper timesheets. The problem was not the format but how people actually filled them in.

Employees basically filled them in whenever they remembered, breaks were written down roughly, and everyone added up their hours differently. For some the whole calculation was in minutes, for others in fractions, and for a third group a hybrid of the two. So there was no uniform system, and for payroll everything had to be added up once more.

At the end of every month that meant extra work for the payroll accountant: recalculating hours, hunting for corrections and asking questions. The more people, the longer it took.

Excel schedules where the formulas mysteriously broke every month

Scheduling lived in a separate spreadsheet. It was designed as a system, with formulas, protected cells and a fixed structure, but in practice whoever maintained the sheet managed to break the formulas “by some miracle” every month, even when the cells were protected.

To get correct quarterly figures, several spreadsheets had to be followed in parallel. The more spreadsheets, the more room for errors, and the harder it was to check that a number in one file matched the number in another.

Every alternative ran into the same problem

There are plenty of time tracking systems on the market. Kevin looked at several and concluded that they share one weak point: people forget. The system itself may be technically sound, but the employee still has to do something at the right moment:

• Clocking in by phone: the older generation is reluctant to adopt new technology.
• Clocking in by card: if someone forgets to tap the reader, the situation is the same as with paper. It also creates a new bottleneck. On paper the employee could fix a mistake themselves, but a missed card tap can only be corrected by an admin.

Either way the core problem would have remained: accuracy depends on whether a person remembers to press a button or tap a reader at that moment.

Why SmartTrack clicked

hours24 SmartTrack approaches the problem from the other end. The employee does not have to remember anything, because the system does the tracking. The tag is in the employee's pocket and a Bluetooth beacon detects that it is nearby.

For Silva-Agro the decision came down to this: the tag is in the pocket, the employee arrives at the workplace and time tracking starts automatically. When the employee leaves the area, the rules the company has set first put them on a break. If the break lasts longer than an hour, the system ends the working day at the moment the employee left the workplace.

For employees: fewer chores, more visibility

The expected resistance from employees never came. Kevin: “Employees took to the change well, because it did not bring extra obligations but extra options.”

Filling in timesheets disappeared. Instead, employees can see their running hours and their schedule at any time, in the app or on the web. The question “how much have I worked this month?” gets answered without asking a manager.

For management: reports in seconds, not days

On the admin side several things got simpler at once:

• Reports on profitability, overtime and payroll come out of the system without manual adding up.
• When planning shift work, you can see at any moment who is at work and where.
• At the start of the month there is no waiting for employees to hand in timesheets. They are already on the platform.
• Messages to staff go straight to email and to the phone screen through the app.

The real gain: both the company and the employees won

One small but telling detail: after introducing SmartTrack, management noticed that automatic tracking sometimes shows more hours than people used to write down themselves. Not fewer, more. The hand-filled timesheets were not systematically in the company's favour. They were simply inaccurate, in both directions.

We saved time on payroll, and on the time tracking side both the company and the employees benefit. Where there used to be calculation and recording errors, we now see that staff in places put in more time than they used to write down.

Why hours24 and not something else

Kevin sums up his experience with an assessment that matches what we have had in mind all along while building hours24: a solution should not specialise in one thing when a company has five things to solve at once.

Since Hours has a lot of ideas in the works, I would say that as a business owner you get an ideal all-in-one solution together with excellent customer support. Time tracking, staff chat, schedules, contracts, asset management, reports.

What to take away from this story

The Silva-Agro story is not only about one company or one piece of software. It is about why many manually filled systems never quite work: they assume the employee will remember to do something at the right moment, every time, every day, every month.

Forgetfulness is not a personal failing. It is a design flaw in the system. A system that needs perfect memory to work needs correcting every day. When the system does the tracking itself, most of the correcting goes away too.

Thank you to the Silva-Agro team and to Kevin Allik for sharing this story with us.