[UK] Tracking time spent on work for clients and customers in order to invoice them correctly can be a real headache for freelancers and companies alike. Which would also explain why time tracking solutions is a very crowded market. But that isn’t stopping 1DayLater, a feisty new startup from the North East of England founded by David and Paul King.
The two brothers say that having worked as freelancers themselves they decided to “scratch their own itch” after finding it hard to keep track of how much time they were spending on behalf of their clients and the difficulty this created when it was time to invoice them. The resulting product, says Paul King, distinguishes itself from the competition, which includes the likes of Toggl, Lets Freckle, Harvest and Klok, through the ability to log time, money and mileage via a single entry, as well as better visualization tools and search, and the browser-based application’s overall ease-of-use.
The service is currently in Beta and will remain free of charge until at least February. After which 1DayLater will cost between £10-20 per month. (Update: There will always be a basic free version, therefore it’s a classic ‘freemium’ play).
1DayLater also offers a fully documented API so that developers can build additional functionality on top of their data. Outlook integration is already in the pipeline courtesy of the The North East Centre for Digital Innovation’s Codeworks developer scheme.
To-date the company is privately financed – around £20k – based on a 6 month fellowship at Teesside University (Institute of Digital Innovation), other grants and a personally guaranteed EFG (Enterprise Finance Guarantee) bank loan. 1DayLater is hoping to raise additional investment to help fund and accelerate growth and plan to target the North East of England’s new JEREMIE funding that we recently wrote about.
Since founding 1DayLater, the “King Brothers”, as they are known locally, have become very active in as well as a benefactor of the region’s startup scene (see their blog). Local digital initiatives that they are involved in include Teessides Institute of Digital Innovation and Sunderland Software City, both of which 1DayLater is also a case study for. Paul King is also an official North East Ambassador helping to promote the North East as “a great place to live and work.”
Proof of their allegiance to the region, the two brothers recently sprang to the defense of the North East after an article was published in the Telegraph newspaper written by Milo Yiannopoulos (of TechCrunch Europe ‘fame’) entitled “Sun Tech Mission 2009: it’s (still) grim up North” which criticised the area’s limited startup ecosystem. Paul King commented that “rather than being “grim up north” it’s actually an exciting and thriving environment to be starting a business in.”
All of this hasn’t gone unnoticed locally either. 1DayLater was recently voted by the regions largest newspaper as one of the North East of England’s top ten brands.