Ask any professional-services firm where the margin goes and the honest answer is: into hours that were worked but never billed. Not because clients refuse to pay, but because the hours were never written down.
How time leaks
- Friday reconstruction. Timesheets filled in at the end of the week are estimates. People round down, forget the fifteen-minute call and skip the context switch that cost an hour.
- Unlabelled work. Time is recorded but against the wrong engagement, or against "internal" because the right code was not to hand.
- Approval lag. Entries sit unapproved past the billing cut-off and slide into next month, or out of the invoice entirely.
Capture at the source
OctoFlow starts from a different place. A local background agent on the consultant's workstation records active work context: editor events, terminal sessions, calendar entries and system events. Categorisation happens on the device before anything is transferred, so the raw activity never leaves the machine. What syncs is aggregated time against engagements, not a log of what someone typed.
Privacy is a design constraint, not a setting
Every transfer is protected with mutual TLS backed by a private certificate authority, so each workstation authenticates itself to the company node and nothing else can inject or read entries. On-device filtering means the firm gets billable time, not surveillance data.
Review, approve, bill
The consultant reviews the auto-filled grid, corrects anything mis-mapped, and submits. Project managers approve against project rules and billable ratios. Verified timesheets export to ERP and HR systems such as SAP and Hr.my, or as spreadsheets carrying cryptographic verification marks, so finance can trust the numbers they invoice from.
Where OctoAssist fits
For teams that also run OctoAssist, its local client provides one of OctoFlow's activity streams, which is why the two products are built by the same team and deploy together cleanly. OctoFlow does not require OctoAssist.
The cheapest hour to bill is the one you already worked. Recovering it is a data problem, not a discipline problem.
Existing clients use the OctoFlow portal at octoflow.thirdoctopus.com. New teams can request a demo through the contact form and see the sync run against a sample week.
