AlpineLink

Too many lost billing hours

In 2020, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Laurin Berli founded AlpineLink — at the time, it was just a side project alongside his vocational training. A year later, as his company gained more and more customers, he faced a problem familiar to many young business owners: How do you efficiently track working hours and project costs when your team is growing and customer projects are becoming more complex? “Without time tracking, there is no pay. We had Excel lists where we entered start and end times. It was tedious and prone to errors. At the end of the month, it was always a struggle to add everything up.”

With multiple managed domains and a team of three specialists, AlpineLink needed a solution that could do more than Excel spreadsheets. Manual time tracking not only took time, but also led to inaccuracies in billing — a critical issue for a company that works on an hourly basis.

From Kimai On-Premise to Kimai Cloud

Laurin began his Kimai journey with the self-hosted version. “I was looking for a self-hosted time tracking solution because I want the data to stay with me,” he explains. As a tech-savvy entrepreneur, he valued control over his data. His team consisted of freelancers who enjoyed the ease of entering their working hours, and Laurin was satisfied with his on-premise time tracking system.

But as AlpineLink grew, so did its requirements. Updates became time-consuming, and the time spent on system maintenance was time lost elsewhere. “With the self-hosted version, I had to install all the updates myself. That takes time,” says Laurin. “Now we don’t have that time anymore because we have to focus on our core business—web design and hosting for our customers.” The switch to Kimai Cloud was the logical consequence.

25 activities and a clever workflow trick

The migration to the cloud version went smoothly. Laurin was particularly impressed by the Microsoft integration: “I linked the login to Microsoft, which makes it easier for us because we use Microsoft everywhere – and then you also have 2FA.”

The real success lay in the well-thought-out structure. What started out as two activities has grown to 25 different activities that AlpineLink now records – around 20 of which are billable and 5 internal. “In my experience, I only recorded one project at the beginning. Suddenly, a support request comes in and your workflow is disrupted because the activity doesn’t exist yet,” explains Laurin. “I would recommend that new Kimai users think about what activities they have at the beginning so that their workflow is not disrupted.”

A particularly clever approach: Laurin has created a “transitional project” – a project to which he can allocate time when no specific customer account exists yet. “When I’m in the middle of my workflow and a customer who doesn’t have an account yet comes in, I can first allocate the time to this project. At the end of the week, I then create the correct projects. This way, the workflow is not blocked.”

The results

The structured hourly overviews in Kimai provided customers with a better overview of their projects. “For key customers, we have a customer portal where they can track the hours worked on an ongoing basis—not just at the end of the project. We’ve only received positive feedback,” Laurin reports proudly.

A concrete example illustrates the effect: for each time entry, the team notes the corresponding support ticket. “If the customer later asks, ‘Why does this now cost 20 Swiss francs?’, I can say, ‘Okay, take a look at the ticket to see what we actually did.’ It’s like a review for them.”

Particularly valuable: project budget controlling. “When we notice that we have already used 80% of the quoted amount, we send the customer a message. We’ve only had that since we started using Kimai,” explains Laurin. This transparency prevents unpleasant surprises and strengthens trust.

Scaling the business with confidence

Today, Kimai is an integral part of AlpineLink’s daily routine. The system supports all administrative decisions. “For payroll accounting, I simply go to the annual report for all users and see: Okay, someone worked 15 hours this week, so I can pay their wages,” says Laurin, describing the simplified processes.

“We saved time in several areas. First, in time tracking, second, in project controlling, third, in creating invoices, and fourth, in payroll accounting.”

With a growing customer base and increasing project complexity, AlpineLink plans to further expand the customer portal. “We’re still working on it. We’re currently working on two projects with this customer – whenever we get back in touch with a customer, we continuously create the corresponding customer portal page.”

Would Laurin Kimai recommend it to other companies? “Yes, I would. It really enables us to bill on a project basis, which is our main use case. That’s why I can only recommend it.”

A clear statement from someone who has gone from Excel lists to self-hosting to a professional cloud solution – and learned that the right software not only saves time but also builds trust.

Thank you, Laurin Berli, for the inspiring conversation and all the best for the future of AlpineLink!