Overview
Altus Forensic’s billing runs through BigTime — powerful software that was never designed for fast field time entry. The app we built sits in front of it: a Progressive Web App that installs to any device’s home screen and works offline when BigTime’s API doesn’t cooperate.
Staff log time three ways: start a live timer on any active case, punch in hours manually, or tap a quick-start shortcut for their most recent time logs. Any of the three routes the entry straight to BigTime in the background — no manual export, no copy-paste, no end-of-day reconciliation.
Every entry carries a sync badge that shows exactly where it stands: synced (green — confirmed in BigTime), pending (yellow — queued to push), edited (orange — changed since last sync), or locked (gray — submitted through BigTime, read-only). The status footer shows when data last synced so nothing is ever a mystery.
The app pulls the last two weeks from BigTime on every page load, so entries made elsewhere stay current. If the same entry changes on both sides, a conflict dialog shows both versions side by side and lets the user choose which to keep — nothing gets silently overwritten.
Cases and labor codes load from BigTime on first run, then cache locally. Typeaheads search cached data instantly, even offline. Cloudflare Access handles authentication via Microsoft SSO so there’s no separate login to manage.
Day view and week view cover different workflows — attorneys reviewing a single day’s entries versus investigators who want to see a full week of billable hours at a glance. Both support inline editing with no modal clutter and a 5-second undo on deletes.
This is what a focused, single-workflow build looks like in practice — the pattern we describe in building an AI workflow that actually saves time.
