ChimeHive case studies

Customer background

Customer 1 is a family-owned specialist joinery company with over 40 years in business. From its own workshop it designs, manufactures and installs bespoke joinery for hospitality, commercial, retail, healthcare, education and public projects, in Ireland and internationally.

Every job is bespoke and passes through several production steps, so what a job really costs depends on how long each stage takes. Accurate time data is the foundation for pricing work well and protecting margin. With around 50 staff across the office and production floor, everyone needed to record time against the work they were doing, and the office needed to turn those hours into payroll every week.

Life before ChimeHive

In 2025, Decision Analytics carried out a Digital Discovery project with Customer 1, reviewing every area of the business. Time tracking stood out, because it affected pricing, project control and payroll at once. After searching the market and finding nothing that fitted, Decision Analytics built ChimeHive.

• Time on jobs wasn't visible. Hours were tracked by project code, with no breakdown by job, piece of work or machine.
• Quotes relied on estimates. Without data on how long similar jobs and stages took, the commercial team priced work from estimates and itemised spreadsheets.
• Managers worked from last week's data. Hours came from the previous week's paper sheets, so managers asked floor staff directly for progress updates.
• Timesheets were filled in from memory. Production staff wrote up their hours at the end of each day.
• The same hours were keyed in three times. The office typed sheets into Excel, then the accounting system, then Smartsheet, and chased missing sheets before payroll. It took a full day every week.

Why ChimeHive

Customer 1 set clear requirements: time logged against customer, job, drawing and production stage; a clock-only mode so hours can't be typed in after the fact; a live view of who is logged in; and alerts when someone hasn't clocked in.

More than a dozen tools were assessed. Low-cost time trackers couldn't track at job and stage level, and enterprise systems were more expensive and slower to implement. ChimeHive tracks time from customer down to job and stage, runs on a standard tablet or any browser, and produces a payroll file that goes straight into the accounting system. It sits alongside Smartsheet, so time tracking was fixed without waiting for a wider ERP project.

Paper worksheets stayed in use alongside ChimeHive during the first weeks of rollout.

Results: visibility that drives better quoting

Visibility of time on jobs. Staff log time against the customer, job and stage they're working on. Managers see how long each job and stage is taking without chasing the floor for updates.

Better quoting. Recorded time on completed jobs gives the commercial team real evidence of how long each type of work takes, so new quotes reflect actual effort. That has delivered €250k in margin.

Admin savings. Removing paper timesheets and re-keying saves €45k a year in admin time. Payroll that took a full day now takes 30 minutes to an hour, and hours flow straight into payroll and Smartsheet.

Customer voice

What's next

Customer 1's digital roadmap includes live KPI dashboards for time allocation and, in the longer term, a joinery-specific ERP. ChimeHive is built to sit alongside MIS and ERP systems, so the job-level data captured today can feed those systems as they arrive.

Customer background

Customer 2 is one of Ireland's leading graphic design, print, signage and branding companies, founded in the 1990s. Its work spans vehicle graphics and fleet branding, large-format print, signage and wayfinding, shopfronts and retail displays, exhibition graphics and interior branding, for some of Ireland's best-known brands.

With 61 staff across design, sales, production, installation and administration, the business needs to know who is working, when, and who is off. That drives both day-to-day job scheduling and an accurate payroll every pay period.

Life before ChimeHive

• Leave was requested on paper. There was a limited view of who was off and when, requests could go missing, and each person had to be told manually whether their leave was approved.
• Clocking in and out didn't meet their needs. The previous system missed time, and hours from staff working off-site were hard to verify.
• Payroll prep was manual. With paper leave and a clocking system that didn't connect to payroll, hours were totted up and keyed into Collsoft by hand.

Why ChimeHive

Customer 2 needed one place for the people side of time: who is in, who is off, and how many hours each person worked. ChimeHive covers all three.

• Leave management. Staff request leave and managers approve it in ChimeHive, giving everyone one clear record of who is off and when.
• Clocking in and out. Staff clock in with facial recognition on a shared tablet kiosk, or from any web browser. Clock-ins can be tagged with geo-location, which helps verify hours for staff working off-site.
• Automatic payroll export. ChimeHive's time data exports automatically to Collsoft Payroll, so hours no longer need to be re-keyed before each pay run.

Results: leave, clocking and payroll after ChimeHive

Staff clock in and out and request leave in one place. Managers approve leave without paperwork. When payroll is due, hours flow from ChimeHive into Collsoft Payroll automatically instead of being keyed in by hand.