Strategic Digital Projects - Case Study
Building Structured Time-Tracking Infrastructure From the Ground Up
Case Study 3:
The Challenge
The architecture practice had been tracking time across Toggl and manual spreadsheets - workable day to day, but never designed to scale with the practice. Historic time records held valuable detail: staff role and rate, RIBA work stage, and project subcategory, but it lived in inconsistent, free-text fields with no shared structure across sources.
The practice wanted to move to Monograph, a purpose-built platform for architecture practices, and bring 312 existing time entries with it, intact and properly structured.
The Objective
To learn Monograph from first principles and migrate the practice's time-tracking history into it in a way that would:
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Preserve every entry's role, rate, work stage and subcategory detail
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Translate inconsistent free-text records into a consistent, queryable structure
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Establish a tagging and categorisation approach suited to how the practice actually works
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Eliminate whitespace, case and delimiter errors before they reached the new system
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Produce a fully validated import, tested before committing all 312 entries
The Solution
Rather than treating this as a straightforward file upload, the migration was approached as a data rebuild, informed by close study of how Monograph structures time and project information.
1. Platform Familiarisation
Monograph's data model was mapped in detail before any migration work began, to ensure the destination structure would actually hold the source data correctly.
2. Data Reconstruction
Records from Toggl and manual spreadsheets were consolidated, correcting formatting inconsistencies and reconciling entries recorded differently across the two sources.
3. Structured Tagging
Each of the 312 entries was assigned a consistent tag combining role and rate, RIBA stage, and a subcategory parsed from the original descriptions, replacing scattered free-text records with something reportable from day one.
4. Validation Before Migration
The full file was checked for whitespace issues, case mismatches and delimiter integrity across all 312 rows and 35 unique tag values, then proven with a single-row test import before the full migration was run.
The Outcome
The practice moved from fragmented, cross-platform time records to a single, properly structured history in Monograph, delivering:
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312 time entries migrated with zero data loss
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Role, rate, stage and subcategory detail preserved and reportable from the outset
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A validated, tested import process rather than a one-shot leap of faith
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A new platform mastered and correctly configured with no prior experience of it
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A tagging structure the practice can extend as new projects begin
Strategic Value
Adopting a new platform is only as good as the data that goes into it. By learning Monograph from the ground up and rebuilding the practice's time-tracking history around it - rather than forcing old records into a new system unchanged - we turned a routine software switch into the foundation for genuinely usable reporting going forward.
This project reflects the level at which we operate when organisations require discreet, strategic oversight of digital and operational infrastructure.
Support with selected strategic projects like this one are available, price on request.