How to Automatically See Where Your Team's Time Goes (Without Timesheets or Surveillance)

Hey everybody. I'm sorry, I think first few people are just joining. Sorry, this is our first time doing one of these in Riverside, so still learning everything. I'm really excited to get started. It looks like we have Jam, Matthew, Faron. Thank you guys, thank you for joining. We have a chat box. Can you guys see that? And yes, all right, Matthew. Yeah, Matthew, I think we've been chatting over this in the support chat as well. Is that correct?

All right, we are now up to six. Yeah, people are flowing in. I am really, really excited to do this workshop today. This is gonna be the first of many. I'm gonna wait maybe a couple more minutes just to let some more people come in. But we're of course recording this as well. And then we'll be sharing a follow-up email with some information from the workshop, but also

a little playbook on how to implement this, and we will be opening up for Q&A at the end. The Q&A I think should be more to the process, but if there's anything specific for the Rize users that we want to work through, then definitely let me know. Okay. Where is everybody calling in from today? Maybe you guys can drop it in the chat.

Nashville, amazing. Love Nashville. Orange County, nice. Good morning. France, nice. All over the world. That's awesome. We got North America. I'm based in Lisbon. Our team is US based, some in the Philippines as well, so it's a global audience. That's awesome. Love to see it. Super cool. Can everybody hear me okay? I'm

just getting a notification that there's some issues maybe with the connection. Okay, cool. All right, well I'm gonna actually get started, and I'm gonna start with sharing my screen. Let's get this started. So we've titled this workshop very straightforward: how to see your team's time without screenshots and surveillance. That's what we are all about at Rize. I'm excited to get into it. Can you guys see my screen? I think it should be live. All right, I'm gonna present.

Yeah. All right, everyone can, yeah. I can see the chat. Everyone can see my screen. Nice. Awesome. All right, well, I'll get into it then. So yeah, the name of the workshop is, as I mentioned, really straightforward. It's basically how to automatically see where your team's time goes without timesheets or surveillance. Again, we're gonna be running these workshops every two weeks. So we wanted to start with our bread and butter, which is what Rize is really all about in a lot of ways.

I'm really excited to get into it today. So a couple things. This session is recorded. Feel free to drop questions as we go in the Q&A or in the chat, and I will address them as they go. I think there is a Q&A and a chat function. You can post in either. The chat's probably better. And then at the end of this, we're gonna be following up and sending a visibility playbook with some prompts and some other stuff included in there.

Yeah, and some other resources. So we're recording this as well. Don't worry if you have to hop early or anything like that. Okay, now what are we actually gonna cover today? So, first we're going to cover why visibility and getting visibility is so hard. I'm sure you guys are all familiar with that as leaders in the professional service space or agency space. But we're gonna be breaking down that problem, really why is it so difficult, what are solutions? Then we're gonna talk about automatic time tracking, how to roll it out, how to message it. Then we'll talk about setting it up. Now

we'll get a little bit specific in Rize, I'll share my screen. Then we're gonna work on crafting our team report and looking at some examples again in Rize, but a lot of this is generally applicable. Then we'll talk about, from just insights to action, how we can use SOPs, routines to automate some of these workflows and just be even more efficient in the way that we run our team and get visibility. And then finally we'll have some Q&A.

So yeah, it should be a fun day. Now this workshop does work with or without Rize. Obviously we're gonna be sharing Rize and we're going to be going through how to set it up, but there's a lot of ways to do this and we've structured it in a way so that you're not tied into Rize. So if you want to use a different approach, you can.

We're gonna talk a lot about higher level processes and flows and questions here. So it should apply. If you want to use Rize as a source of data, which is really common, we have an amazing MCP and API. We're an agentic first company, so anything you can do in the dashboard, you can do through the API and the MCP. And so if you want to connect Claude or ChatGPT and have Rize as a source

in addition to a bunch of things, we would love that. We want to connect your systems and be part of that. Or if you don't want to use Rize at all and you want to build something on your own, that's totally fine. We're actually happy to help with that too. We just love the space. Okay. Now why is the week a blur? Well, it's very hard to get visibility because there's a few reasons. So first off, we work across so many tools.

Chat, email, calendars. So in the past we've worked with clients that try and set up a dashboard in ClickUp or they try and set something up in Linear, but it doesn't show the complete picture. And that's because work's really spread out. Then another one is that reporting actually falls on your team. It's a lot of admin work, even with AI today.

Manually reporting what you're working on, doing stand-ups, they all take time, right? We've all been in a stand-up that takes 30 minutes of everyone's time just to say what they're working on. It's admin work, right? And then even if you are able to get the dashboards and those updates, you still have to dig into it. You have to spot the trends, you have to make sense of it. So basically, dashboards don't think for you. It still requires you, and you're busy putting out fires. You're busy dealing with a whole bunch of issues, you're executing on the business, and so it's still gonna require you to take that extra step.

So the result of all this, why is it important to have visibility, is basically you end up being reactive rather than proactive. So some examples of this are a client goes over budget, right? Someone burns out and quits because they've been way over capacity for way too long. You miss a deadline, or scope creeps up and your margin slips away. So this is all extremely common. I'm sure we can all relate to this.

So what does good team visibility look like? This is really important as well. We all know why it's hard, but what does it really look like? What is it composed of? So we like to think there's four aspects of good team visibility. One is status. What got done, what's getting done, what's the status of all these projects? Where does everything stand now? Another is capacity, team capacity utilization, right? Who's stretched, who has room.

Who's been maxed out putting in sixty hours a week for the last month and needs a break? Then there's fires. These are emergencies. What is about to go over, what deadline's about to slip, what's blocked? These are areas that you need to know immediately, right? And focus on that as a leader, right? And then upcoming. What's next in the pipeline? What work is coming up on the map and where do we need to

get the team to a place to be able to handle that. This all allows you to be proactive, right, rather than reactive, if you have good visibility. And so how do you get good visibility? Well, we are biased, obviously, but we think the solution is AI automatic time tracking, specifically Rize, but there's other options here, right? So automatic time tracking for us is the solution because the work is captured automatically.

Right? That's key. No timers, no timesheets. You're not adding admin to your team's time. It's organized automatically. And by the way, why is that important? I think it's because manual time tracking is extremely inaccurate. I think we all can relate to this, and it's inaccurate because it requires a ton of admin work from the team members who are busy executing. And then even if they do it, what happens is people just fill out their timesheets at the end of the week and they're guessing at that point.

And the data's not accurate. So you're either not getting the data because people aren't doing it, or it's inaccurate, which means you can't make real business decisions on this. And so that automatic capture is really key. The second is organized automatically, and this is where the AI comes in. With the recent advances in AI, we can actually automatically track time and we can categorize it in these very complex ways very accurately.

So you want to make sure that time is landing on the right client and project, again, or the data is not accurate and you can't make good business decisions on it. And the last part, again, is even more new, I'd say. And it relates to the AI again, where it's analyzed automatically. That's what Rize brings: it's gonna pull out trends, analysis, highlights, anomalies for you so that you don't have to go into that dashboard and look at it. You will get messaged in the app itself.

And that's where things can get really, really exciting as well. There's a fourth step where it's actually starting to take actions, but we're not gonna cover that too much in this workshop today. Okay, now why haven't we all rolled out AI time tracking, automatic time tracking? Well, oftentimes there's hesitations. There's pushback you'll hear, or maybe even pushback you have yourself. The first one is admin. Is this AI tool gonna take more of my time and more of my team's time? That's totally fair, right? The second is accuracy. Is this actually gonna be accurate? So even if we set this up and it's automated, is it accurate?

Because again, if it's not accurate, then you're building on inaccurate data, which you can't make good business decisions on. The last one is privacy. This is probably the biggest one that you'll get back from the team: I don't want to feel like my team is being surveilled or micromanaged. And this is really important. It's almost a cultural issue, right? And these are all, I think, fair concerns, valid, that

you have to have an answer to address for the team before you roll out. So how do you address those, right? We all know that AI automatic time tracking is extremely beneficial, but how do you roll it out in a way that doesn't affect team culture, right? And gets acceptance by the team. They're all important, but the first is choose the right tool, right? You need to choose a tool that's automatic, accurate, and private by design.

It needs to be no or little lift for the team because you don't want to add more admin work, but also make them feel secure. You don't want to be taking screenshots, you don't want to be too invasive, no surveillance is key. Now the second one is messaging. We're gonna cover that a lot today, and some processes around messaging, like messaging why you're using an automatic time tracker, how you're using the data,

what data you see. That's really important to get buy-in from the team and not affect culture before. And then the last one is building the process with your team. So going over that data together, asking for feedback, including them in the process can make them feel like the tool is not being used for surveillance, but to actually help them, which it is. And additionally, it will help them get value from the tool in the process as well.

So Rize is built for all of these. We've been in the time tracking space for a long time. Rize, we've been a profitable company for six years. And we built Rize, the team product, specifically with this in mind. We wanted something that was extremely private, but extremely accurate and extremely automated. So the way that we do this is a few differentiators on the privacy side. The core tracking in Rize is not screenshots.

It's metadata only. So we use metadata of the active window, which is app name, window title, and URL. So that means by default, you're never going to be capturing passwords, health information, anything in the window content. That's really important and valuable because your team can know that it's gonna be secure. Additionally, that app and website data is not shared at the team level. We just use it to automatically generate those timesheets. And then those team members can approve

and reject what time is shared at the team level. There's a grace period. Things will be auto-approved, but they have that chance to review things. That's really important, right? Because you're giving them the trust to use the tool. And additionally, we have really, really granular privacy settings. So team members can filter apps they don't want Rize to ever track. You can do basically anything you want. Custom data retention. They'll have complete control.

And this is important to message because this is gonna defuse one of the major pushbacks of using automatic time tracking and getting that automatic visibility that is so important for running your team and your business. Now, whatever tool you use, whatever setup you use, you want to make sure that it does all of these as well.

Now accuracy and automation. So Rize is extremely accurate and extremely automated as well. So even though we've taken a more privacy approach, you can expect eighty-five percent client classification accuracy, ninety-five on label consistently, review times of one to two minutes, and over an hour saved in time per team member per week. So if that's forty people on the team, you've

basically hired a new person by rolling out Rize. All right, so let's get into messaging this and how you want to roll this out. So again, a key is messaging. How do you message to your team that you want to roll out automatic time tracking? So the key is stressing why, right? You want to say, we need to understand our client, if a client budget's going over or under.

We need to understand our margin to operate as a business. We need to understand capacity so we know when to hire and who's overworked. Explaining why to the team is really important because they're smart. Once they understand why you're using a tool like this, you're gonna get buy-in a lot more easily. The second is what, right? How are we going to do this? With Rize, it's explaining to them how the data is captured, who sees what, why, how it's private. That's another really important one.

And then the third one is how. How is the data going to be used? And this is where you can really include the team. So we always say once you get your first report in Rize, whether it be around client budget, project budget, capacity, either share the Rize dashboard screen, set up a meeting with the team, or take some screenshots and share it in Slack or record a Loom and walk through the data and show them how you're using the data to influence

these really big decisions around capacity. It's like, hey, Jane, we saw on Rize that you've been working 60 hours a week this week. We need to get you help. We need to scale this down. We saw that this client was going way over budget and our margin's really low on this contract now, so we're gonna be upping the price, which means we'll be able to hire more people, XYZ. Basically,

once they see how the data is being used and that it's not being used for surveillance, but just to run the business in a more efficient way, they're gonna be more on board. Now, the last one is what's in it for them as well. This is unique to Rize, but we like to call it out. Time is our most valuable asset. And at Rize, we started as a B2C product, just for individuals to track their productivity. We still have a lot of those features in the tool. And one of our core

initiatives at Rize is to add value to everyone in the organization at every level of the org. So time tracking in general generally only benefits admins or team admins or the administration in a company. With Rize we really have built it, and it's important to us, that the team members can get benefit. They can use our MCP and they have access just to their own data so they can analyze how they're spending their time.

They can integrate with Claude and ChatGPT and see how they can be more efficient. We have a lot of cool productivity features like focus timers, breaks, music. It's important that they get value from the tool as well. And I think stressing that they can learn and grow in their career and the way they work by using Rize is another benefit. Maybe a bit secondary, but still something to call out.

Okay. I'm gonna now actually go in and share the Rize dashboard a little bit, but I wanted to take a quick pause, just so I'm not chatting the whole time, and open it up to see if anyone has any questions about anything or comments about anything we've shared so far. If you do, there's a chat button and you can just share that there and I can read it out and we can discuss that. If not, totally fine and I can get into a little

the little demo. Question from the chat: can the manual reconciliation period be extended? Yes. That's a great question. So right now, Rize is going to automatically approve time entries within 24 hours. You can set that to be sooner or later. Actually, yeah, you can fully customize it, and I'll show how you can do that. So we generally recommend that you want Rize to approve time entries either by the end of the day or within that first 24 hours.

And that's because you want people to get in the habit of just looking at their Rize data, saying it's okay and approving it. It should take a minute or two. If they do it at the end of the week, it's gonna be really hard to remember if it was accurate or not looking back. And so you want them to get in the habit of just taking a look at the Rize dashboard and saying it looks good and approving things. So we generally recommend it at the end of the day or within that period, but it can be extended or customized.

Any other questions? Yeah. Thanks, Akile. Okay, cool. All right, so sorry, I'm actually not gonna get quite into the demo yet, but I wanna start taking the steps of, all right, let's get into actually how are we going to get good team visibility, right? So we've covered what visibility is, how Rize works, da-da-da, but now let's actually get into the meat for setting it up for your team, right? Now the first step, this is before we even get into the tool.

Decide what matters. Start with the questions that you want answered. Now this is really important because when you're tracking anything, any metric, or if you have any goal, understanding the metrics you need to judge if that's correct or not, or on track or not, is really important. So start with the questions you want answered is a great way. What do you need to see every day or every week to have that visibility? Sometimes it's

time spent on client, maybe it's time on project, could be time on ClickUp task by member, just could be overall work time, right? Understanding that is really important and it's where you need to start. The other thing is start simple. So sometimes we work with clients and they say, we want to track clients, we wanna track each client project, and then we wanna know for each client project what tiny tasks they're working on.

That can be really appealing from the admin side, and I get that because I love data. I want to see every little bit. But you have to understand that as your tracking setup gets more complex, the AI is gonna be less accurate, and the review for the user is gonna be harder, right? That's just the reality. The more complex it gets, the more brittle the system, right? And then also the harder it's gonna be for the team to run. And it can be even harder to digest that information, right? So know your outcome, and then what we say is,

what is the least amount of tracking we can set up and the least complex tracking we can set up to get that outcome, to answer those questions? Less is more here. Because you can always start simple, get the team on, and then add complexity. But it's a lot harder to tweak complexity or scale it back if the team already thinks the tool is too hard to use, right?

Once you've settled on what needs to track, so let's say we just want to track labels and clients, right? We'll cover Rize a bit. You want to import your clients and projects, right? Or tasks: clients, projects, tasks, however you want to set it up. Set up your workspace defaults. This is really important as well. We're gonna cover that. And then give context to the agent in Rize. We're gonna cover this as well. So this is really important, right? Because the context allows the AI agent to be more accurate right out of the box in that tagging.

The workspace defaults are gonna make sure everybody gets Rize set up perfectly. This is really important. And then also you want that data in Rize already before you add your team members, because when they join Rize, it's gonna start tracking. And so you want their clients, projects, tasks already in Rize so that things can start tagging immediately. Now, if you integrate with ClickUp or Linear or Asana, this is gonna bootstrap this quite a bit. But these two steps are also still really helpful.

Okay. Now messaging as well. Talk to the team before, don't just send them the invite generally. That can be a team meeting if you think your team's gonna be really worried, or you can drop a Slack message, right? Explaining what we talked about in that messaging, the who, how, what, why, right? And then you can start tracking, right? Make sure that they know this is coming and if they have questions, we are always happy to help

in that regard too. If you have questions around this, we have the playbook that we're gonna be sharing that has some ready-to-use scripts and answers to common pushback, but feel free to loop our team in. We deal with this all the time. I have not run an onboarding or an implementation with a client where their team has had issues once they understand how Rize works. So definitely loop us in. We're experts in this. All right, then you send your invite and start tracking.

So I'm actually gonna pause here. I'm gonna just go through a little bit of the Rize dashboard. Now I'll also be sharing a demo after this, but I wanted to just show you guys a little bit of how Rize works and how the tracking works in Rize itself. Actually, I'll do this slide too. So this last step is once you send invites, everyone's gonna download the app.

It's going to be a macOS or Windows app. And the tracking is going to start immediately. And it's going to start showing up in the dashboard, right? And so that's basically what I want to get into, because now in this part, I'm actually gonna walk through a little bit of how Rize works. So this is the Rize dashboard. You can access the Rize dashboard in the web app, but you need the macOS or Windows app to actually track.

So if you're an admin, you might not need the app, you can just use it in the browser. But the team members who are tracking will need it to track. Now, this is just a demo environment, but I do love to start on the calendar view because the calendar view is a great visual representation of how the app works. So in this first column, you'll have the apps. Now these are the apps and websites that the team is using, and you can see this is the metadata that's tracked. So app name, window title, and URL.

Then that data, again, is never shared at the team level, but instead it's fed into our system that basically does three things. It's gonna group this into similar types of work. This is the time entry, right? It's gonna tag it and it's gonna add a description. So sorry, this is just test data, there's no description, but basically those are the three things it's gonna do. And this is what you would be doing if you were manually tracking time. These are what these time entry suggestions are. Now again, these are pending

for the team, and they're gonna be pending till the end of the day, or however you set it up, like Akile mentioned. But they can review these ahead of time. This is more or less the flow. They can hop into the app a few times throughout the day or once at the end, and they can accept this if it looks good, they can change tags if that's not accurate, they can reject it as well, and if they reject it, that time is never shared. And so again, this is how Rize is built

to be very team-centric and privacy first. Now, in terms of the tags themselves within Rize, if you go down here, you'll see we have tasks, projects, clients, and labels. Now, tasks can belong to projects, projects can belong to clients,

and then labels are basically structured tagging of the time. So labels, every time entry gets a label, only certain time entries will get tasks, projects, and clients. And they have that hierarchy, and that's when I say you want to figure out exactly what level you want to track at, right? So it could be that you just want clients, that's super common. Or just clients and projects and you don't need tasks. Tasks in Rize are assigned tasks, so they can be like

a ClickUp task with an assignee and a due date. If I go to my settings, so I'll go to my home first. Here is the agent home. We're gonna get into this in a bit because there's a lot you can do. But if I go to prompts, this is where the agent knowledge lives. This is where a lot of that context is gonna be. So you can see I've added a bunch of context to the workspace. You can actually work with the AI to set this up, but it says

this is a demo, right? But Northbeam Studio, we're a six-person creative, these are how we work with clients. This is when to ask to tag, to do that. This is how we tag. This is what we want to track. That's really, really important because that's gonna help the agent be more accurate out of the box. Additionally, you can set up skills. So skills are basically shared prompts that you can use across the board. So

this can be really helpful. So let's say, tagging prompt, I can share that with the whole workspace, right? And then in these custom tag instructions, I can use that skill and save it. So that's a really nice way to get set up. Additionally, each member, when you set them up, you can actually set up their agent with guidance, which is context of how they work, tagging instructions as well, and then all of these default settings. So again,

this is an area you might want to check up under the member defaults. These are the default settings for people in your workspace as they join. So maybe you don't want to have distraction block or break notifications for anybody, or you want everyone to track 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. in their local time zone. You can set that up there and all users will get this when they sign up, or you can apply it to all users as well. So that's just prepping the workspace and getting it ready. When you're ready to add team members, you can do that

in the members tab as well. Just click new member and you can add them. You can import them from CSV. We have a lot of ways. Similarly with clients and projects, when you want to import, and tasks: you can integrate with ClickUp, Linear, or Asana, or you can upload them as well via a CSV or one of these connectors. So if you have any questions around that, we're happy to help. We have a very robust API and MCP as well that you can use. All right, so that's getting all around setup.

And again, if you guys have questions about this, let me know. I know I'm moving quickly, but I wanna just make sure we cover everything. All right, so you've set up everybody, you've set up the team, you've invited everybody, and now the data is starting to roll in. So now you're gonna wanna use the Rize dashboards and our AI reports to get this visibility. You're also gonna wanna use something we call routines,

which are basically automations that you can build to take action on those insights you're gonna get from the reports, and we'll talk about that. So we have static dashboards in Rize. You can see anything you want. You can filter, they're really nice. I'm gonna demo them. And this is the more traditional kind of UI. It's there. We also have AI-generated reports and AI-generated analysis that we're also gonna cover and set up.

You can also, again, connect our MCP to ChatGPT or Claude and get that analysis there. And then you can build this report prompt and have it run on a schedule, so you can automatically be pulling that out consistently. And that's what we're really gonna be focused on today around that visibility: constructing good context, constructing good reports and a good schedule for when you want to run those reports, what information you want to get out of them, and then what to do with them as well.

All right, so crafting the reports. Basically, I'm gonna be focusing on these AI reports. Again, you can do these in Rize through our agent and our reporting structure, or you can do this by pulling the data into ChatGPT or Claude. You can actually generate a report in Rize, and then that report is available in the MCP and the API, which means that other agents can pull it in and take actions on it. So that's a really common use case.

But the key with these reports is they're essentially prompts that you're running. And so it's important to get the prompts right. And the prompts can be really unique to how you work and what you're looking for. So be explicit about the sections, we say. You can call out using specific tools. So just for more context, I'm not sure if everyone knows, but MCP is called model context protocol. It's a way that agents can connect to tools, like

products like Rize or Slack or whatever. Now when Claude or ChatGPT connects to a product like Rize, they have these actions they can take which are called tools. So that's the wording there. So a tool in Rize is list time entries, for example. Now when you're using prompts, it can be helpful to add the specific tools to make sure you get the consistency there.

But it makes the prompt a little more brittle if those change at all or if anything changes. So you can use it without the tools, it's more flexible. Some of these newer models are better without the tool. We recommend not using the tools, see how it goes. If you're not getting consistent results or issues, you can try adding the tools. If you have questions about that as well, I know that might be a little technical, but feel free to reach out. We can go deeper on that. We love working with

teams to get this right. The other thing is iterate. The first prompt you write might not be the best prompt. And the best way to do it is iterate with it, use Claude or ChatGPT, or even better, our Rize agent to craft the prompt, and then continue to tweak as you're using it. It's a living, breathing report, and it should continue to grow and change as your needs grow and team changes.

Okay, so now I'm gonna get back to our demo environment and I'm gonna talk about crafting the report, how to set that up, the MCP, and the agent. Okay, so we talked a lot about importing the tools and the tracking, and so now we're gonna get into this analyze section. Now, analyze, there's a lot of different dashboards, and we're actually working on simplifying this, but they're all pretty basic. The first static Rize dashboard that you'll see is the Time Entries tab. So this is really a very powerful

view, it's really cool. You can basically cut any of the data that you want this way. So I can group by members, that's gonna be basically the rows, and then I can stack by any one of these attributes. So if I want to see members by client, I can do that here, right? And then any of these views I can export to CSV or PDF. I can stack by team and see by client. So we only have one team here, right?

But you can see by client. Then we have a few tabs here as well. There's charts, bar chart, pie chart. Again, you can export this as well. And then the log. Now the log is the time entry data under the hood. You can always export that as well to CSV. And these are all the individual time entries. You'll see if they're pending, it's gonna say pending approval, you won't see the details. If they're approved, then you will see the details. And you can

This is all the underlying data of that. Additionally, we have a bunch of filters here for clients, projects, any way you want to cut the data. You can search. This is your classic dashboard view. We also have a timesheets page. This is also really, really helpful if you're managing specific timesheets. You're gonna see this purple if people are going way over their utilization or capacity. If you see this little yellow, it means that time's still pending. Then if I click on any one of these, I can see the approved time entries in a nice little time entry view and I can even edit the data here as an admin.

Team members can see these views too, which is nice, but they only see their own data. Team admins see the whole team, and then org admins see across all teams. That's also important to call out. We have custom dashboards. These are fun. You might want to check these out. They're cool as well. And then of course we have profitability. We're actually running a workshop on profitability next week. That's part of the biggest benefits of tracking with Rize as a professional service firm or agency.

So I'll be sending that out, but we can set this up and it's very, very cool. But what we're really working on today is the reports. So reports are really cool. They're basically a way to run the agent on a schedule with a prompt. So if I click on new report, we have a bunch of templates already set up. So we can go into this weekly team report. And you'll see it has a bunch of different options here, but the key is

AI generated, this is the prompt that's gonna be really important. And so this is what you want to craft. We have some of these in the playbook, but this is gonna be really important. You can also use skills in the prompt as well. So that's really cool if you want to reuse that across different ones. Then you can change, is this for a specific team? Is this for the whole workspace, all my teams, is this just for me? And then you can choose the visibility, who receives this report. Then you set up this cadence, where you get it, Slack, email,

who receives it as well, via the delivery. You can add team members outside of Rize as well. And then you'll get these really, really nice, fully AI generated reports. So I'm just gonna show you one here. Sorry. This is our demo environment, so sometimes we do get deploys in the middle of these

in the middle of these presentations. While this loads, I promise Rize production is not this slow. But I'll maybe take a pause as well to see if anyone has questions to this point.

Now, just give this a second. All right, here we go. Sorry, there was just a deploy. All right, so this is what a report will look like in Rize that's AI generated. Now, what makes it special is it's a rich report. So it's gonna have clients, you can hover over details, you can click on them, you can see the projects, it has these really nice artifacts. It's really, really valuable, it's really cool. And this report again is available in the MCP or the API. Now, another thing is

this report you can chat with. So you can open up the chat and use our Rize agent to dig into this report. So you can ask questions, ask follow-ups. This is just the jumping off point. And you can do this in Rize again, or you can do this outside of Rize with ChatGPT or with Claude. One other aspect is, well, picking the reports, I guess we can talk about that later. And then I also wanna cover routines, but we can cover that I think at the end actually. So let me get back to the presentation. No questions so far around the reporting stuff.

Cool. All right, so now that you have the report, what do you do with it, right? So I think ask follow-up questions with the agent, you pull it into Claude or ChatGPT to look for more analysis, combine it with your other systems. And then also, like we mentioned, pull in the team. These reports can be really helpful if you pull in the team and get them involved in the process.

I think the key is just, you don't want these reports just to sit in the inbox, read them and try and take action. That's also why framing these prompts and getting them correct is really important. So these are some of the things, right? If you see a client or project's over budget, rescope it or address it. If you see scope creep, try and figure out the process underneath it. If you see someone that's overworking, try and get that before burnout. Or if something just feels off in the client time. What's really nice is

agents can do a lot of this too. So if you have a weekly report running, or daily even, right? An agent can pull in the entire month in Claude, let's say, or even the Rize agent, can look at all of the report's output, right? And say, where can we improve our process, right? What do we need to do? And they might recommend you take these actions for you. So there's a lot you can do with the reports, you want to put them to work.

These are just a few of the reports you can run that we recommend, and we'd be happy to help you get set up. So a daily team report understanding what got done, that's more of status, right? Start of week can pull in upcoming calendar events, or it can use our resourcing tool for utilization to see who has capacity, what's coming up. And end of week can be great to again understand how the week went, what's the status of everything going in.

The daily is also great for fires as well, like blockers. And then the end of the month. That's more meta-analysis that our agents are so good at running. And how can we improve as a team now that we have a month of data? Where are there inefficiencies? Where do we need to reprice? Or where do we need to hire? Who's gonna be burning out? You can do those at the end of the month. Now, I'm not gonna talk too much about this

today, but this is an area that we're adding a lot of functionality in and I'm really excited about it, and it's basically routines. So routines in Rize are this tab under home, and again, they're a way that you can run the agent on a schedule to take certain actions. It's a way to automate certain things. So giving nudges on the timesheet, prepping for a client call or a team meeting, drafting updates

for clients or flagging scope creep. It can do all of that and it can connect to your other systems as well. So this is really powerful. We're adding a lot, but why I bring it up is because these routines are how we're trying to help automate your day more, your processes more. And reports can be a great jumping off point on how to do that. So yeah, if you guys have questions about this, let me know. Routines are like scheduled tasks in Claude where you can pull in other things, like you can connect Slack or Gmail and send emails. So you can do a lot of similar stuff in Claude directly and we'd be happy to help you get that set up.

Now when something looks off on the data, this is really important, we like to cover it because again, this is about managing how your team perceives the tool. So if you see something that feels off, how do you approach that, right? So first, double check the data, because anomalies can often be setups, not people. Always assume

good intent, give team members the benefit of the doubt. And then ask privately with curiosity. So, I saw that you only logged two hours this week. What's going on? Or I saw that you logged twenty hours and they're all user generated. Why? Is this accurate? Sometimes you'll see that. Or I saw this task took all week and it should have taken a few hours. What's going on? One of the things is we very often see

with automated tracking, that there's issues with the system, not the person. Sometimes there are bad actors, but oftentimes we've seen it is the system and the automatic tracking just surfaces that. So a great example is we worked with a video production agency. They're doing video edits, right? And they saw in Rize that all these tasks that they estimated were taking so much longer. So they reached out, fully remote team, reached out to some of the editors.

And it just turns out that the company computers that they bought were not powerful enough for the video editing software, and they were spending so much time just sitting around waiting for the editing to finish. So they ended up getting new computers for everybody and the team's productivity basically doubled. So I love that story because it just shows how automatic time tracking can pull out processes or systems that you wouldn't even see the impact of without it. And I think you can really put a number to it, which is key.

All right, so I think we're gonna land the timing. I can't believe this. I wanted to leave 10 minutes for Q&A and I think we'd be right on track. So in review, decide what you need to see, message it and include the team, set up the workspace, invite, start tracking, review together, review anomalies, and then take these insights and take action on them.

Don't just let these reports sit in your inbox, review them and actually make your team more efficient. That's key as well. So we have a playbook. I'm gonna share it. Let us know what you think as well if you have questions. I'm just gonna drop this in the chat. This playbook we will also send via email. Additionally, if

I know a lot of Rize users here already, but if you're interested, we would love to chat if you're interested in getting your team on Rize or rolling Rize out with your team. This is a Calendly, book a call, we'll chat with you and understand if it's a good fit. I'm sure it will be, but we'll be honest and we will help you get set up. And the last one is we have another workshop in two weeks.

We're gonna be trying to do this every two weeks. It's around which clients and projects actually make money and how to track that. That's such a huge part of Rize. So I just dropped the Luma there if you're interested. Yeah, please, please register. Okay. So again, we're gonna send a follow-up email right after this, so no worries, with the recording and everything. But yeah, thank you guys. One last thing. We'll also have a little survey. I'm gonna also drop this here, but again, this is gonna be in your email.

It has a few questions on this workshop, how we can do better, how we can make the next workshops better, more helpful. So feel free, if you have two seconds, just answering those, that's really helpful for us. All right, Q&A. I see Greg around, hovering. So these are, yeah, some questions around Rize. Okay.

It's a question around Rize. I think everyone can see this, but Greg is asking around some behavior during minimizing Rize. I think this is on Windows. I will show you that quickly. So this relates to the Rize widget. Where are we? Where's the widget? Basically the widget you can hide on Rize. Here it is. Okay, can you guys see my screen?

Just need to drag the widget into the right window. All right, can you see this? Oops. No, that's not what I want. Sorry guys.

Not working right now. Greg, I will answer your question. I will send you an email on how to do this. But if anyone else has that, basically you can just use the widget menu to hide the widget if you're having issues with that. But excited to have you back. We love our AppSumo users, they mean a lot to us. Any other questions?

Yeah, that's a great question. Question from the chat: is there an easy way to import clients? Yes, and projects. Really easy. One is using the agent and the API. That's something that could be really powerful. So you can even use the agent here to import

You can add files, drop files here, and you can import that way. Additionally, we have CSV imports for clients and projects. You just go to that tab and you can import via CSV. And then of course we have the API and the MCP. So you can have an agent import, either our agent or Claude or something else, import that way. So it should be really straightforward.

Any other questions? Okay, this is Jam. Question from the chat: aside from automatic activity tracking, users can manually add? Yeah, that's a really good question. So you can manually add time, it's really easy. Again, you can add it through the API, through our Slack agent, through our own agent, or you just add it the old fashioned way in the UI just by dragging and dropping. Just click, drag and drop, add time entry, and you can add the tags here. You can even

You can even click save and add another, and it's really easy to just add a few back to back, which is really nice. So yeah, plenty of ways to add manually, and that's totally valid. That happens sometimes. Matthew, that's a really great question around auto-approving. So right now the default is 24 hours. There are ways you can set it up to be a bit sooner or later using routines. So I'll actually walk through this, because that's a really good question. And then Akile, really quick. Question from the chat: any questions in the home tab

are native and secure within Rize? So everything is secure. No data is ever used or trained by Rize, we don't train on the data, we never sell data. When you use the chat here, we do use other LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. We use a variation. But that data is never trained, it's very secure. And yeah, you don't have to worry about your data being sold or trained or anything like that. And then about the auto approval. So that's a really good question, Matthew. So basically if you go to team settings, you'll see that for each team there's a setting called

auto-approve time entry suggestions within 24 hours. Now we have some big updates coming here, but this is the default, where basically time entries are going to be auto-approved within 24 hours. Now, if you want to, you can create a routine that auto-approves, where everyone's time is reviewed and auto-approved, let's say at the end of the day. So, how are you gonna do that? I'll walk you through that. You click new routine. Let's say we can do tag review, review, after that,

approve all pending time entries. So this is a routine that we're gonna run for the entire workspace or for just a specific team. This means that this routine is gonna run for that person. So their agent's gonna run this as well. And then what we can do is let's do this every day at

10 p.m. and then send an email as well. Create routine. Now what that means is this tag review, you see how that has a workspace label. It's running individually for everyone in the workspace. And so what happens is their time's gonna be reviewed and then also they're going to, oops, I'm having some issues.

They're going to get it auto-approved basically, but at the end of the day. So if you have any questions about that, Matt, let me know. But that's cool because you can cover how you can actually run routines, set routines up for everyone on the team, which is really cool. We're gonna be doing more workshops on routines and automation, so I'll keep you posted on that. And if you have questions, definitely let me know. Yeah, thanks.

All right, we have just a couple minutes left. So thank you all so much. I just want to take the time to thank each and every one of you for joining. We had some technical difficulties, but I think this was definitely a success from our perspective. So yeah. Thank you everyone. It means so much that you guys use Rize and that you've joined for the call and we're just really grateful to have all of you

as customers or interested in using Rize. I'm gonna stop sharing. And last but not least, I'll be following up as well with the playbook, with some other resources, the recording, any of those links. So yeah, this is the first of many. Yeah, thanks, Matthew. Yeah, we have another one coming up in a couple weeks, so we're gonna keep doing these. And thank you guys again. If you have any questions, I'm dropping my email as well in the chat. Feel free to reach out, and yeah.

Thanks so much for using Rize. We'll talk soon.