Building cal2ts: How I Automated Timesheet Hell for My Engineering Team
As an engineering team lead, I've always been passionate about finding ways to reduce administrative overhead and let my team focus on what they do best: building great software. One of the most tedious tasks that consistently took time away from actual development work was timesheet management. This led me to create cal2ts, a tool that bridges the gap between calendar events and timesheet entries.
The Problem: Timesheets Suck
Let's be real - nobody likes doing timesheets. At Cloud303, we were spending way too much time:
Copying meeting details from our calendars to Odoo
Trying to remember which project that meeting from last week was for
Getting distracted from actual development work to do admin stuff
Missing billable hours because we forgot to log something
I was watching my team waste precious brain power on this stuff, and I thought: "There has to be a better way."
Enter cal2ts
I built cal2ts (short for Calendar to Timesheet) as a web app that automatically converts your calendar events into timesheet entries. The cool part? It uses AI to figure out which project and task each meeting belongs to.
Here's what makes it awesome:
One click to push your calendar events to timesheets
AI that learns from your previous timesheet entries
Smart matching of meeting titles to projects
Gets better over time as you correct its predictions
How It Works
The tech stack is pretty straightforward:
Frontend: SvelteKit (because it's fast and fun to work with)
Backend: Python with Flask
AI: Claude 3.5 Sonnet via AWS Bedrock
Hosting: AWS (because that's what we do at Cloud303)
The magic happens when the AI looks at your last month of timesheets and uses that to predict where new meetings should go. It's not perfect (what AI is?), but it's way better than starting from scratch every time.
The Impact
The results have been pretty sweet:
Timesheet entry time went from "ugh, I'll do it later" to "done in 5 seconds"
We're actually capturing all our billable hours
The team is happier because they're not getting pulled out of their flow
I'm not getting Slack messages asking "which project was that meeting for?"
What I Learned
Building cal2ts taught me some cool stuff:
Sometimes the best tools are the ones that solve everyday problems
AI doesn't have to be fancy to be useful
Internal tools deserve good UX too
The best automation is the kind that learns from its mistakes
What's Next?
The tool is working great for us at Cloud303, but there's always room to make it better:
Smarter handling of recurring meetings
Better project matching
Maybe support for more calendar providers
Some cool analytics to see where our time is going
Wrapping Up
cal2ts might seem like a small thing, but it's made a big difference in how our team works. It's not just about saving time - it's about keeping our engineers focused on building cool stuff instead of fighting with timesheets.
The best part? It's a living example of how we can use technology to make our work lives better, one annoying task at a time.
