Looking Back at 2019: Hubstaff Year in Review

2020 is officially here, and with it comes a new set of goals, aspirations, and — everyone’s favorite — a look back at the past year.

Let’s get to it. Here’s how 2019 went for Hubstaff, our team, and our customers. And here’s what you can expect from us next year.

Let’s look at Hubstaff Tasks

Baremetrics Open Startup stats

Like any good startup, we’re driven to report on our growth and set goals that keep us on track. Here’s a quick recap of our growth in 2019 from our Baremetrics dashboard.

In their own words

Of course, our success relies solely on seeing our customers succeed. That means more people growing their businesses and working more efficiently.

Here’s how they did it with the help of Hubstaff in 2019.

“When you have over 40 people sending in their timesheets with the total number of hours worked, it’s incredibly tedious and time-consuming. Not to mention there’s no way to verify the hours printed on those timesheets and invoices. With Hubstaff, it’s all online and the hours worked are verifiable via the monitoring function.”

― Christian Mairoll, founder and CEO at Emsisoft

“Switching to Hubstaff from Upwork saved the company thousands of dollars in freelancer payment fees.”

― Cody McLain, Founder of SupportNinja

“The desktop application and mobile app have proven extremely easy to use for our remote team, and forecasting our spending has never been easier for our management team.”

― Kahl Orr, Founder at Rise

“Hubstaff allows me to take automation of administrative tasks to the next level, and has been critical to ensuring my virtual staff is taken care of. I don’t have to worry about manually managing payments or vacation days, Hubstaff can do it all for me.”

― Brad, Founder of Spekless Cleaning

---

---

“It was easy to set up the new hires in Hubstaff and link them with a financial payment institute. We were able to track their hours and pay them right away.”

― Jing Moore, Chief Financial Officer at WRS Health

“Using the Projects and Tasks features, we’re able to essentially use a magnifying glass to focus our energy and start a fire.”

― William Lipovsky, CEO of First Quarter Finance

Our personal favorite (because we love saving customers money)

“If we were still using freelance services to pay and manage people, it would cost us $170,000 per year than what we’re currently paying to use Hubstaff.”

― David Judge, Co-founder at Affordable Staff and Online Specialists

Other milestones to celebrate

Hubstaff <3s Gusto

Just like Hubstaff is designed for how modern businesses track, manage, and empower their teams, Gusto’s “all-in-one people platform” makes it easy for businesses to pay, onboard, and protect employees.

With this integration, you can manage time tracking, employee info, payroll, and compliance insights with Gusto directly inside Hubstaff.

It’s a perfect pairing for efficient operations.

Read our love story >

We made the Inc. 5000 (again)

We’re pretty thrilled about our 498% three-year growth, but earning a spot on the 2019 Inc. 5000 because of it is even better. 

This is the second year we’ve made the list, thanks to our amazing customers and remote team. This year, however, we climbed to the top 1000 to the 852nd spot.

We’re one in 5000 >

We launched Hubstaff Tasks (and emojis in comments 🥳)

After years of refining, testing, and using it ourselves on a daily basis, we released Hubstaff Tasks to the public.

The Agile project management software was created to help teams easily work together and accomplish their goals more efficiently. It was built for the same reason we started Hubstaff: to help growing businesses run better.

It’s visual, scannable, and ideal for people who like getting stuff done.

How we stayed on Tasks >

---

---

We launched job sites for automated time tracking

This is a big one. In 2019, we launched job sites: geofenced locations that use your mobile device’s GPS to automatically start and stop time tracking.

You can use job sites to track when team members enter and exit specific locations, and how much time they spend there. Just create a job site, edit the radius, and add team members to it.

Enable automated time tracking for your team members when they enter or leave a job site, or choose to just send them reminders.

We’re geofence fanatics >

Desktop app redesign

We updated all our desktop apps with a new look and streamlined functionality. We’re heading into 2020 with a fresh look because why not? 

These are just the major milestones from this past year. Next, we’ll go over all the product updates and new features that made Hubstaff more robust and user-friendly.

Feature releases 2019

Teams

Create teams and easily add members and projects to them. You can also assign team leads with extra permissions, and filter reports by teams.

Save report filters

Finding the data you need is quick and easy when you save your report filters. Save your preferences including filters, how report data is grouped, and your column views to be used again in the future.

New integration setup and management

Hubstaff offers 37 integrations with the most popular products in project management, accounting, help desk, and payment processing. Setting up and managing these integrations is faster and easier than ever.

Scheduled reports

Schedule and customize your reports to automatically send by email with the day, time, format, and frequency that works best for you.

Billable & non-billable hours

Easily set your time to billable or non-billable. This gives you more flexibility when creating projects, budgets, sending invoices, or viewing reports.

Achievement badges are live!

Your team can earn badges based on the performance metrics that you set. Members will receive badges in their dashboard and you’ll get a weekly email to show your team’s progress.

Recurring budgets

Create budgets that reset monthly for projects and clients. Get automatic alerts when limits on hours, bill or pay rates are approached.

Web timer

Our web timer allows you to track time to projects and tasks right inside your browser. This timer does not record activity or screenshots.

Download screenshots

Download screenshots for any member of your organization. Just look for the download icon on the screenshots page.

Duplicate projects

Easily duplicate a project and what’s in it. Choose what you want to duplicate or leave out in Hubstaff Tasks (project members, workflow settings, tasks, and all their details) or Hubstaff (members, to-dos, client, and budget).

New schedules page

The schedules page has a new look and more options to view. Check out the daily, weekly, and team views all with a click.

Offer per-user pricing

Add or remove members from your organization whenever you wish with our per-user plan. Only pay for each user you add after two people.

Recurring holidays

Choose from our list of preset holidays, or set a custom holiday that recurs every year. You can even auto-add members who join later.

Notification center

Stay up-to-date and informed with specific alerts from your organization. See each notification until you have completed an associated action.

New payments dialog

With two clear steps, you know when you’re marking time as paid, and when you’re exporting and sending payments to your team.

Integrations: Auto-sync new projects

Hubstaff can now automatically add new projects from some of our most popular integrations, so they appear like magic. Works with Asana, Clickup, Trello, JIRA, Pivotal, and Teamwork.

Mark to-dos as complete

You can now mark a to-do as completed right in your browser. Just go to the To-dos menu, and click the ‘Actions’ drop down.

Apps & URLs report by member

When you’re looking at apps and URLs, you can now customize the report to group data by member, project, or date.

Filters on members page

View what you need faster with page filters. See new member role descriptions, and information about your plan, all on one page.

New settings menu

We reorganized the Settings menu into groups so you can find what you’re looking for faster.

Show hide features in the sidebar (add-ons) 

Organization managers and owners can remove features from the sidebar so you only see the ones you use most. Check out the More features item at the bottom of your sidebar to add or remove each one.

Filters on the timesheets pages

View timesheets by idle time and activity percentage. This makes it easy to quickly review, edit, and bulk delete.

View schedule details

Click on any shift to open a detailed view of the team member, see shift hours, and edit options.

New reports page

We refreshed the look of the reports page and made things easier to find, by removing any reports that aren’t available to you. You won’t see ‘management only’ screens anymore.

Star reports

Easily view your favorite reports by starring them so that they show up in your sidebar.

More charts & graphs in reports

Reports are more visual and easier to scan. With charts and graphs, you can get a clear view of your data. Check it out on the Reports page.

New sidebar design

The new sidebar is wider, lighter, and easier to collapse. You’ll quickly find what you’re looking for and then hide the sidebar once you get there.

Quickly switch between products 

With a helpful dropdown menu in the upper right corner of the app, you can switch between Hubstaff, Hubstaff Tasks, and Hubstaff Talent.

What’s next?

Mark your calendars for …all of 2020 because we have some big announcements coming throughout the year.

Hubstaff

• Zapier integration 
• Syncing all app timers (view, start, stop timer from any device) 
• Instant syncing to HS Tasks 
• Work orders and jobs 
• Improvements to timesheets, time off, invoices, activity, and more

Hubstaff Tasks

• Automated standups
• Epics
• Time tracking in Hubstaff Tasks

 

Hubstaff behind-the-scenes

Now that we’ve covered the highlights, let’s take a look at what our team did in 2019.

We’re up 15 team members

We went from 40 members of our Slack organization at the beginning of 2018 to 55 now. Growth!

Top Slack users (by messages sent at the end of 2019)

We met up in Mexico

This year, the Hubstaff team gathered in Cancun, Mexico, for our annual retreat. Volleyball was played. Presentations were given. Karaoke was sung. Friendships were formed to carry us through the next year. 

We asked the team to summarize the experience:

“My favorite part of the retreat was the different ways Hubstaff really values a culture of appreciation.

The first thing we did to break the ice as an organization was looking one another in the eye, shaking hands, and saying thank you to one another for making the effort to travel and be together.”

“My favorite part was the last night dinner toast held by Dave and Jared. It added so much value to the entire group, it felt like being part of something great!”

“Just getting time to hang and relax with everyone.”

Favorite projects from 2019

We asked our team what they enjoyed working on the most, and what they’re looking forward to in 2020. Here’s what they had to say.

“Geofences work. It was new and lots of fun to play around with.”

“Improving the onboarding experience was a fun one to work on. Teams, new desktop apps, Sprints, and Achievement badges were all fun, too.”

“I worked on a lot of cool stuff being in QA. I get to experience new features firsthand. However, I would say that the top 3 items that I worked on in 2019 were stand-up updates, job site location tracking and shared tracking state. This last feature introduces the ability to have all time trackers (i.e. desktop, mobile, web timer) to start tracking automatically and sync up the time being tracked when tracking is started in one of our apps.”

“The best thing I worked on in 2019 was getting Hubstaff listed on RemoteOnly.org. We are a remote only company empowering remote organizations with time tracking, “proof of work” and project management software solutions, and it is awesome to be listed alongside companies with similar values like GitLab, Buffer, Zapier, InVision, Automattic, and others.”

“Continuing to develop the Job sites UI on the Hubstaff app. Why? Because it was challenging and I got to learn more and more about the new Vue JS framework we started adopting throughout our apps.”

“I made an Error system for the Payroll Integrations that makes all the errors we display to customers much better and more descriptive. This was a really noticeable change down in support tickets from what I saw.”

Looking ahead

“I was recently promoted to become the Director of Customer Experience, and I am PUMPED to be leading our team of awesome customer pros!”

“We have some big projects planned for the field service industry in 2020, so it will be fun to see that growing.”

“I want to get the new Payroll integrations added and update the PayPal API to use the new version they have.”

“I’m looking forward to continuing to see Hubstaff grow and expand into various markets. And I’m really looking forward to our 2020 retreat!”