How Clutch eliminated manual time card audits across 100 concurrent projects with Timesheet Policies

About Clutch

Clutch is a Series B fintech startup whose professional services team manages approximately 100 concurrent implementation projects at any given time. The team comprises around 30 consultants, 12 project managers, and 16 implementation engineers, all of whom track time weekly against project-level forecasts.

Daniel Levine, Director, Professional Services & Implementation, had a clear picture of what good time card governance looked like rules encoded directly into the system, automated flagging, and manager notifications without requiring anyone to go looking. The gap between that vision and the manual reality the team was living in kept widening as Clutch scaled.

‍The problem: a manual process that could not scale

At 100 concurrent projects, the PS team generates hundreds of individual time card line items every week. Reviewing them was technically possible, but only if someone was willing to do it by hand, one card at a time. The core problem was not that data was missing. It was that surfacing any meaningful signal from that data required a level of manual effort the team could not sustain at scale.

Seeing overages required opening every card individually

Spotting whether a consultant had logged significantly more time than their forecast for a given project meant navigating into that person's individual time card, finding the forecast, and reconciling the two numbers manually. There was no aggregated view, no automated comparison, and no way to see across the portfolio without repeating that process for every person and every project.

"If you wanted to see whose time significantly exceeded what they were forecasted for a given project, you had to dig into somebody's individual time card, manually look at what their forecast was, and reconcile that."

The ops contractor's time was going toward routine checks

Clutch uses an hourly ops contractor whose weekly capacity is limited. A portion of that capacity was going toward manual time card reviews: work that was necessary but added no analytical value. Every hour spent on routine checks was an hour not spent on process improvement, enablement, or higher-order operational work.

No early warning on over-utilisation

Without automated flagging, managers had no proactive signal when a team member was heading toward burnout or when a project's actual hours were diverging from its forecast. The visibility existed in theory, but extracting it required effort that consistently lost out to other priorities. By the time anyone looked, it was often too late to adjust.

‍The shift with Timesheet Policies

The team came to the evaluation with a clear picture of what was needed. Having seen automated governance work at more mature organisations, the requirement was specific: rules that could be encoded directly into the system, exceptions flagged automatically, and managers notified without anyone having to go looking.

"I knew what this needs to look like in a mature state. I immediately saw how Timesheet Policies would be able to accelerate us getting there."

Rules configured in plain language, working in minutes

The first test was direct. The team configured a rule: flag any consultant who logs more than 150% of their allocated hours on a project in a given week. The logic was entered in plain conversational text, the system created the rule, and it was tested immediately by entering a time card that should trigger the flag. It flagged instantly.

"Literally three minutes to create a rule, test it, it worked the first time. The process could not have been smoother. It just worked exactly as advertised."

Automated scanning across the full portfolio

Timesheet Policies now runs automatically across every time card submitted each week. Exceptions surface without anyone having to go looking for them. The ops team opens a saved view in the approvals section and sees everything flagged in the previous week in a single pass, rather than reviewing cards one by one.

Consultants feel seen, not just monitored

Hard flags, where the system prevents a time card from being submitted incorrectly, created less friction than expected. The team understood that catching an error at submission is faster than fixing it after a follow-up message two days later. The softer impact came from the soft flags. When a consultant logs an unusually high number of hours in a week, the system surfaces a note acknowledging the effort and flagging it for their manager to action.

"Hopefully that makes them feel seen and lets them know that their workload and their potential burnout is really important to us as a leadership team."

Leadership visibility without a report being built for them

Before Timesheet Policies, the team had three options: ask the ops contractor to manually review everything, ask managers to review their own team's cards, or accept that neither would happen consistently. Timesheet Policies removed that choice. Flags are surfaced automatically and leadership can see what needs attention without anyone preparing a report first.

What's next

Timesheet Policies arrived at the same time Clutch was already planning to use Rocketlane's forecasting module more rigorously. The team had been updating forecasts roughly once a month. The new goal is to update them continuously, with actuals tracked tightly against estimates at the project level.

Timesheet Policies is the enforcement layer that makes that forecasting push possible. Without automated checks on whether actuals are tracking to forecast, more frequent forecasting would just generate more numbers to review manually. With policies in place, divergences surface on their own.

"There's more important work to be done than manually sifting through time card entries every week."