Articles ·
One sentence, one product: how KlipTrack came to be
An engineering inspection firm could not find a time-tracking tool that fit. How that became a live system in three months, and why we did not customise an off-the-shelf app.
It did not start with me trying to sell software. It started with hearing a business owner complain during a conversation.
He runs a construction inspection firm. His colleagues are on the road all day: one day at an office renovation in Budapest, the next at a shop being built in the countryside, and a day or two a week in the office. He said he could not find a time-tracking system that suited the way they worked. The ones they tried either did a lot they would never need, or did the important things in a way that did not fit their work.
Either too much, or not the right way. That sentence became the starting point for KlipTrack.
Why not customise an existing product?
The first idea, of course, was to find a good starting point and adapt it. But their problem was precisely that large systems try to serve everyone, and end up fitting no one exactly. An inspection firm does not need shift-scheduling optimisation, inventory management or ten approval flows. It needs to see by the end of the day who worked where and for how long, without making anyone fill in a separate report.
So I started from scratch with a narrow goal: automatically record when someone arrives at a site and when they leave, using the company’s own phones.
The first decisions
Three decisions made at the beginning still define the system today.
- Company phones, not employees’ personal devices. The phone is a work tool, tracking happens during work hours, and the system has nothing to do with anyone’s personal life.
- Sites, not routes. The company adds its worksites, and the system calculates how long people spend at each one. The employer sees attendance, not where someone travelled in between.
- No extra steps. There is no clocking in, signing out or tapping a button on arrival. The phone stays in a pocket; working hours are recorded automatically.
Three months, by date
The first line of code was written on 23 July 2026. It was running on a live server in early August; by mid-month the office phones were connected too. On 17 August, kliptrack.com launched, with a separate subdomain for each company. Since then, the firm has 148 sites and 19 phones in the system.
That pace came from having the same person build every layer—the phone app, the server and the office workspace—and talk directly with the client. If something does not work as it should, there is no support ticket and no three-week wait. There is a phone call or an email, and often a fix the same day.
The first bug, and what it taught me
In the first few days, removing a phone also deleted the data associated with it. Technically, it did “what it was written to do.” In practice, it erased the work recorded so far.
That led to one of the system’s most important rules: recorded history is evidence. A phone or site with a history cannot be deleted, only closed or deactivated. When a colleague leaves or a construction job ends, it disappears from the future, never from the past. Reports still show closed sites and inactive colleagues for every period in which they have data.
What clients have asked for since
The system has grown, but every addition started with a specific request. Payroll needed a time sheet with signature columns and a payroll export. Some colleagues spend a few days a week in the office, so we added office days with their own hours. There are half-day holidays, different working hours on individual days, and a daily schedule showing who is going to which site. Most recently, we started comparing the company’s weekly vehicle report with tracked work time.
One thing matters: every extra feature is off by default. The system now has 16 modules, and each company sees only what it switches on. If all it needs is attendance, that is all it gets.
What I would tell a business in the same position
If your team works at a different site every day and keeping track of hours means manual work, chasing people afterwards or arguing over the numbers, you may not need a bigger system. You may need one that does exactly what you need it to do. That is what I heard in that conversation, and what I have been trying to build ever since.
In the next part, I write about how to track working hours without turning it into surveillance: Time tracking without surveillance.