Automated time capture

Automated time tracking for teams that bill by the hour.

Lotus captures your team's time as they work and allocates it to the right client and matter, automatically. No timers. No screenshots. No keystroke logging. Just an accurate, defensible record of the day.

No timersNo screenshotsNo keystroke logging
The category

Not all automatic time tracking is the same thing.

"Automatic" can mean four very different things. The difference is what a tool has to see to do its job, and what it does with your day once it has.

The approach
How it works
The catch
The clock you start
You remember to hit start and stop.
Still manual, just dressed up. The time you forget to track is the time you lose.
The watcher
Screenshots, keystrokes, screen recording, live location.
Built to check whether people are working. That's surveillance of your team, not a record of your time.
The logger
Builds a timeline of your day for you to sort through afterwards.
An activity log isn't a timesheet. You still do the work of turning it into billable entries.
The reader
Opens your documents and reads the words to write your entries.
To bill it, it has to read it: confidential files, client material and all.

Lotus captures your time, allocates it, and hands you a finished timesheet: no clock to start, no screen watched, no work read.

The real cost

The hours a firm doesn't record aren't the only revenue it loses.

The expensive problem is a bill it can't defend.

A disputed invoice can cost a firm three times over.

01

The write-down

Time that isn't defensible gets discounted at bill review. That's money you already earned, given back.

02

The lock-up

A challenged invoice sits unpaid. Revenue you've recognised, cash you haven't got. Every day it sits is a day it ages.

03

The hours spent defending it

Resolving a disputed bill takes a team, and none of that time is billable. Every hour spent defending the work is an hour spent unbillable.

All three trace back to the same thing: time logged in bulk at the end of the week, when the work, and the cost, is already done. By the time the picture is complete, the proactive moment to manage it has passed.

The evidence

The longer you leave it, the less you remember.

Time reconstructed from memory isn't a little inaccurate; it's a lot. Memory for detail decays fast and predictably, and a timesheet written days later is built on the little that's left.

~70%
of new detail lost within a day
~90%
lost within a week
The forgetting curve, first measured by Ebbinghaus in 1885 and confirmed by modern peer-reviewed research.
Confidentiality

Built for practices where confidentiality isn't optional.

Lotus captures what you're working on. Never the content of your work.

No screenshots.

Not once, not blurred, not on a timer.

No keystroke logging.

We don't record what you type.

No cameras. No screen recording.

The desktop stays yours alone.

No live location.

Geofences detect arrival at agreed sites. Never where you are.

Lotus reads the labels around your work: the application, the document name, the calendar entry, the matter reference. It never reads the document. Personal time stays personal. Your firm sees the timesheet, not your day.

Read our privacy model →
How it works

Built already, before you open it.

1

It captures.

A lightweight agent runs quietly on the desktop, collecting the metadata of your work: the application, the document, the calendar entry, the client reference. Nothing else.

2

It allocates.

Lotus works out which client and which piece of work each block of time belongs to, and assigns it. Automatically.

3

You review.

Lotus presents your timesheet, already built. You confirm, adjust, split or reassign. Nothing leaves your hands until you say so.

4

Your systems can draw from it.

Lotus is the source of truth for time. Your billing and practice management systems take what they need from it.

Tuesday 14 July
Your timesheet, already built
Unconfirmed
6h 40m capturedof 7h 30m target
Meridian Legal → Contract review
Automated · 9:10–10:30am
1h 20m
Harbour Capital → Due diligence
Automated · 10:45–11:30am
45m
Ashfield & Roe → Client call
Meeting · 1:00–1:30pm
30m
Northgate → needs a bucket
2 entries need a bucket
2h 05m

And when the work isn't at a desk (a client meeting, a call, a site visit) Lotus captures that too. It's the time that gets lost first, and it's the time nobody else can see.

Live budgets

A budget at 70% is a phone call. A budget blown at month-end is a write-off.

Lotus allocates time as it happens, so you can see where a matter stands at any time, not at the end of the week, once the cost is already incurred.

That makes the budget conversation a proactive one. Instead of explaining an overrun after the fact, you're raising it with the client while there's still an opportunity to resolve it, whether that's reining the work in or agreeing to spend more. The bill that never surprises anyone is the bill that gets paid.

Base Lotus gives you your data, so you can pull the numbers whenever you need them. The modules mean we do the work for you: let the Delivery module do the managing.

Matter budgets · today
Meridian restructure128h of 180h
71% used, worth a scope call now
Harbour acquisition62h of 140h
On track
Ashfield dispute94h of 100h
94% used, approaching cap
Who it's for

Built for anyone whose expertise is billed by the hour.

You sell judgement, and your revenue is tracked as time. When the record is wrong, the work still happened; you just don't get paid for all of it.

The platform

Time is the base unit of everything.

Every question a firm asks (is this work profitable, are we carrying more capacity than we're billing, did that project make money, should we have quoted it differently) comes back to where the time actually went. Lotus starts there, and when you're ready for more, the rest of the platform builds on it.

Time

Required

Automatic and manual capture on the desktop, clients and buckets, timesheets, approvals, admin and integrations.

Mobile · optional add-on

Capture away from the desk: field entry and geofenced on-site visits. Priced per seat.

Delivery

Project management and resource planning, running against real captured time. Plan the work and staff it, then see how long it actually took against what you planned.

Insights

Analysis across everything you run in Lotus (utilisation, realisation, leakage, profitability) with AI recommendations on top. The more of Lotus you use, the more it sees.

Capture the truth. Plan against it. The rest follows.

Explore the platform →

See Lotus with your own matters in front of you.

Twenty minutes is enough to see whether Lotus fits how your firm actually works. No pressure, no obligation.