Home, Calendar & Timesheets: We Rebuilt The Three Screens You Stare At All Day
Software gets judged on the screens you open every morning, not the features you use twice a year.
For most people running a cleaning or FM business that is three screens. Where am I up to. Who is working. Who gets paid what.
All three got rebuilt in the last week. Here is what changed and why each one matters.
Screen one: Home, now running on your actual data
Shipped 16 September.
The new home page shipped as a preview in July with the right shape and the wrong contents. Your action items and agenda were real. The four numbers along the top, the compliance issues, the jobs by stage bar and the team activity were sample data typed into a file.
Good enough to judge a layout. Useless for starting a day.
Every one of those has now been replaced with the same queries the rest of the app already trusts.
Four principles ran through it.
Every number is a door. A count you cannot act on is decoration. Each tile on the top row opens the list behind it. Overdue tasks goes to Action Items. Approvals go to whichever queue has the most waiting. Active jobs goes to the workflow board.
Same numbers as the module. Jobs by stage uses the workflow board's own aggregation. Overdue tasks uses the same stats the Action Items page uses. Nothing is computed a second way, so the tile and the page it opens always agree. If you have ever had two screens in the same system disagree about the same number, you know why that line is in here.
Honest about what exists. Where there is no data yet, the page says so instead of inventing it. The unpaid invoices tile is simply gone until there is an outstanding balance to show.
Nothing changes until you say so. Classic home is still the default. It carries one banner offering the new one, and the new one carries one link back. Manager or Field, classic or new, your choice saves against you rather than the browser, so your laptop and your tablet agree.
Awaiting approval deserves a mention. It counts submitted timesheets, onboarding candidates and form responses waiting on your sign-off, but only the ones you hold the permission to action. So it reads "waiting on you", not "waiting on somebody".
Screen two: Calendar, rearranged
Shipped 12 September.
The old top bar took three rows and 130 pixels before the first hour line. On a 13 inch laptop, once you add browser chrome and the app header, the grid was left with about 600 pixels and the event editor pushed the people you were assigning below the fold.
You were rostering people you could not see.
So the layout got rebuilt around what the grid is actually for. One 48 pixel toolbar. Day headers sitting exactly on their columns. The grid starts 35 pixels higher. Nothing that was there has gone. Most of it is closer.
The side pane is now one job at a time. People or Jobs, never a tab strip. People shows each person's shifts and hours for the range you are looking at, and goes amber once they pass 38 hours. Tick people and the next event you create starts with them. Drag a ticked person and the whole party comes along.
Jobs lists what needs scheduling, and each card carries the job number, due date, customer and place, so you can pick the right one out of a narrow column.
Shift states are readable across the room. Published is green. A draft is amber and dashed. An unfilled shift is striped and red under every colour scheme, and its title starts with "Unfilled", because a hole in your roster needs a decision before it needs a colour. Off hours are flat grey, so stripes only ever mean one thing.
The editor reads in the order you actually plan a shift. When, then who, then what. Assigned sits straight after the times so the people stay on screen. Repeats read as a sentence: "Weekly on Saturday, ends after 12 occurrences."
And density is now a setting, not a fixed size that suits one monitor. Hours on screen, people on screen, compact or detailed cards, all saved with the view. A wall monitor in the depot and a laptop in the car can keep different settings.
Screen three: Timesheets, in one sheet
Shipped 17 September. My favourite of the three, because of why it was built.
Victor put the old Timesheets screen next to the new Calendar and Customers screens and asked for the same treatment.
The old one drew one card per person per day. It repeated the date on every row. It had a row of five buttons all reading "All Users, All Projects, All Work Tasks, All Jobs, All Status" whether or not you had filtered anything. It put the totals in a shaded banner at the foot.
It worked. It also looked like a different product.
Same week of data: the old screen showed five of the week's 38 entries in the space the new one uses for thirteen, and the new one still has room for day headings and the period total.
Four ideas run through it.
One sheet, not a stack of cards. The date is said once, above the rows it covers, and the heading carries the entry count, who logged how much, and the day's subtotal.
Figures that stack. Times render as a fixed start slot plus the end. Durations as fixed hour and minute slots. Hours under hours, minutes under minutes, dashes on one line. Your eye scans a column instead of reading every row.
Silent defaults. The toolbar only shows a control's label until it differs from its default. Set a filter and it earns a chip. Set nothing and the chip row does not exist. Your screen stops shouting about settings you never changed.
Answers without leaving. Hover a job, a property, a person, a note or a day's total and you get a card with what you would have opened the record to find. The person card shows title, email, mobile, groups, assigned jobs, whether they are on shift right now, and their timezone. Nothing navigates until you click.
Timesheets Admin follows with the same language. Approving a period is now one grid of people by day. Today's column is washed teal. People who logged nothing stay in the list but read in grey and cannot be selected. Click a person and their period opens laid out like the sheet, with approval on each row and on the selection.
Everything from the old screen is still there. Saved views that name the old Date column are read correctly. Custom range was always a fortnight, so it is called Fortnight now.
The point
None of these three are features. You cannot put them on a pricing page.
They are the difference between a tool your team tolerates and a tool your team opens. Over a year, that is worth more than most features.
See them with your own data in them
Book a demo. Ask us to load a real week of your rostering and a real week of your timesheets.
Screenshots are easy. Your data on a screen is the only test that counts.
If it does not read faster than what you use now, tell us and we will leave you alone.
