decoded.legal

A decade of work data on your own platform

When people ask why not just pay for a managed cloud product and forget the hassle, Neil flips the framing: “Why would I want the headache of somebody else’s cloud-based software when I can run software on my own servers under my control?”

Neil has a very practical version of peace of mind: knowing where client data lives, how it is encrypted, how backups work, and what happens when something breaks. His practice runs on clarity, and Kimai became the quiet system behind that clarity: always on, always exportable, always under Neil’s control.

Hosting Kimai with three clear uses

In professional services, the work is often invisible until it is written down. Early on, Neil did what many people do: start with a spreadsheet. It did not last. Spreadsheets invite inconsistency, missing context, and the kind of ambiguity that turns a good client relationship into a stressful one.

So Neil adopted Kimai shortly after founding the firm. He does not even remember the long list of alternatives, because Kimai solved the core job without fuss. Neil’s Kimai setup is intentionally straightforward. No complicated reporting rituals and no obsession over dead time, just consistent tracking and clean records.

He uses Kimai for three overlapping purposes:

• Client transparency so every invoice has a story.
• Internal estimation so future pricing is grounded in reality.
• Narrative record-keeping using text logs so both Neil and the client know what was done.

“I simply start work, click the tracking button, and keep going.”

Clean timesheets, better estimates, and confidence in the data

Over time, Kimai became the backbone of a workflow that clients can understand at a glance. Each month, Neil exports customized PDF timesheets and sends them with invoices, so clients can see exactly what was done.

“Clients should know exactly what time was spent and how.”

Kimai also helped Neil build something many firms never quite get: a long-term dataset of how work actually takes time, which makes pricing more accurate and conversations with clients fact-based.

Why open-source apps matter

In legal work, the stakes are high: client data needs to be handled with care, and “just trust the vendor” is not a satisfying answer. Running open-source tools on infrastructure he controls gives Neil practical confidence.

Open source also protects independence. With open source, Neil could keep using a tool for a decade, upgrade on his timeline, and always retain the ability to export his data in common formats. That portability is what made the transition from Kimai 1.0 to Kimai 2.0 feel safe and simple.

And finally, open source matters because the ecosystem only survives if people sustain it. Neil sees this as a community contract: shared code and shared responsibility. In his blog post, he describes that when he realises how much value an open-source tool delivers, he intentionally supports the maintainer, because he believes the work deserves support.

Keep it self-hosted, keep it portable, and keep supporting free software

Neil has never felt pulled toward managed hosting. Self-hosting Kimai On-Premise is part philosophy, part strategy.

Still, Neil is not dogmatic. He gets why a managed service like Kimai Cloud exists, and he sees it as a smart way to support maintainers and remove technical burden for people who do not want to run servers. “Different solutions work for different people… What matters is having control over exporting your data in common, machine-readable formats.”

So what if you want to try hosting software yourself?

Neil sees two options and has a tip for you. If you want to do it because it’s a fun experiment, crack on with it. Find a cheap computer, hook it up to the network, and see what you can do. Or if you want to run it for your own business, then Neil suggests running it as a project like you’d run anything else. Think through the implications. “Where are you going to host it? How resilient is it? How are you going to secure your machine? How are you going to back it up? How are you going to control access to it? But honestly, for years I ran Kimai along with other software on a Raspberry Pi 3 and it worked absolutely fine.”

Neil chose Kimai On-Premise as a system that respects client data, produces clear records, and still works a decade later.

Many thanks to Neil Brown for the insightful conversation, and continued success with decoded.legal!