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Tikr by Konabos The internal PSA we run on

We stopped renting our operating system.

Tikr is the time-tracking and professional-services system we built to run Konabos, a digital experience consultancy. This page is what it does, what it costs, and where it’s going. There is nothing to sign up for.

Internal toolIn daily useBuilt with AI, owned by humansBy Konabos

01 / 08

Why we built it

For years, Konabos ran on Harvest. It did the job. Time tracking, basic reporting, invoicing hooks. Every consultancy needs a tool like that, and Harvest was the default. We paid the subscription every month and moved on.

Then we stopped. Not because Harvest got worse. Because we did. Every time we wanted a feature that fit how Konabos actually runs, we were waiting on a roadmap we did not control. We were exporting data, stitching spreadsheets, and building mental models outside the system. The tool was no longer helping us run the business. We were working around it. That is the moment you stop using a tool and start compensating for it.

Five years ago, building this would not have made sense. Developer time was too expensive and the feature gap with off-the-shelf tools would have taken a year to close. That equation has changed. With Claude Code and AI-assisted development, the repetitive work on internal tools collapses dramatically and the team can focus on the decisions that actually require judgment. We wrote about how that shift played out across our migration tool, Krios, and Tikr in the launch post (opens in new tab).

Speed alone is not the story. The reason we trust what we ship is that the rigor scaled with the velocity. We work inside spec-driven frameworks like SpecKit and apply the same governance we ask clients to apply on their stacks. Every AI-touched commit is reviewed by a human. Every decision the system makes is auditable. No hallucinated logic in production. The compressed timeline did not come from cutting accountability. It came from cutting the parts of building that were never the point.

We built Tikr the way we would build a product. The architecture is multi-tenant from day one, every query is scoped by organizationId, roles and rates and budgets all live on a permission matrix that would survive paying customers. We made that choice because anything less honest would have rotted under us as Konabos grew. We also made the choice not to sell it. Tikr is not a SaaS. It runs Konabos, and the operational learning flows into the client work we ship. That is the trade we are happy with.

02 / 08

Why we’re sharing this

Konabos is a services firm, not a software vendor. Tikr is not for sale and there is nothing to sign up for. The reason this page exists is that the questions we get on social are real, and how an agency runs itself says more about it than any case study does. If you are weighing build versus buy, or thinking about where AI actually earns its keep inside an internal tool, what we learned getting Tikr into production might be useful. That is the only trade we are offering.

03 / 08

What Tikr is for

Three jobs, in order of importance.

Make logging time painless.

If recording time is a chore, people skip it, and the data underneath everything else gets unreliable. Tikr is built so a week of time entries takes minutes, not an hour.

Tell the truth about projects.

Every entry carries a snapshot of the rate at that moment, every project carries a budget, every client has a margin. The answer to “are we profitable on this engagement?” is a number on a screen, not a question for the finance team.

Grow with how we work.

Tikr started as time tracking. It now handles invoicing, allocation, and integrations with the systems we already live in. The architecture assumes we will keep adding capability, and that we will keep doing it ourselves.

Did you Tikr today?

That is the daily test. The name comes from “tick,” the smallest unit of time. If logging time is not a habit, none of the architecture matters. We designed for the ritual first.

04 / 08

What Tikr is not

Tikr is deliberately not a surveillance tool. There is no screen recording. There is no keystroke logging. There is no idle detection. There is no productivity score. There is no inference about how someone is working from how they are typing. Tikr is also not for sale. It is built like a product so it would survive being one, but Konabos is not a software vendor. There is no signup, no waitlist, no demo.

Konabos does not want those tools. We did not build them. The data Tikr collects is the data the team enters. Nothing more. The AI features that exist (you’ll see them below) are narrowly scoped, opt-in, and never trained on Konabos data.

05 / 08

What Tikr does today

Everything in this section is shipped and in daily use.

Today, Tikr covers eight surfaces: time tracking, clients and projects, invoicing, allocation and capacity, reporting, an eight-tab admin dashboard, roles and permissions, and integrations with Microsoft 365 Calendar and Azure DevOps. Everything below is shipped and in daily use. The cards are the inventory if you want to go deeper.

Time tracking

  • Manual entries with start/end times or duration
  • Weekly timesheet grid for fast bulk entry
  • Copy yesterday or last week into today
  • Notes on every entry, with optional AI cleanup
  • Submit timesheets for approval, lock periods after approval

Clients and projects

  • Full client and project CRUD
  • Hourly rates at organization, user, project, and project-member level
  • Budgets in hours, fixed fee, or both
  • Monthly-reset budget option for retainer-style work
  • Project duplication

Invoicing

  • Generate invoices from unbilled time
  • Line-item editing, tax, discounts, custom invoice numbers
  • PDF generation and email delivery
  • Status tracking: draft, sent, paid, overdue
  • Manual payment recording with partial-payment support

Allocation and capacity

  • Day-level and week-level project assignments
  • Carry-forward from prior periods
  • Country-aware public holidays
  • Team-level region settings

Reporting

  • Time by team member, client, project, or date range
  • Billable vs non-billable breakdown
  • Work-items report tied to Azure DevOps
  • Export to CSV
  • Scheduled email summaries (weekly digests, timesheet reminders)

Admin dashboard

  • Billability, capacity, and profitability tabs
  • Clients, compliance, comparison, projects, and overview tabs
  • Trend, bar, and pie charts on real data
  • Date-range selector across the whole view

Team and permissions

  • Six built-in roles: Owner, Admin, Manager, Member, Contractor, Viewer
  • Custom role creation with granular permissions
  • Field-level restrictions (cost rates hidden where they should not be visible)
  • Invitation flow with accept-invite

Integrations

  • Microsoft 365 Calendar pulls events into the time view
  • Azure DevOps links time entries to work items, with search and tag
  • Tokens encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM

06 / 08

How AI fits, and where it doesn’t

Tikr was built with AI assistance. The repetitive work (schema scaffolding, API routes, form validation, component boilerplate) compressed dramatically. The work that mattered (domain decisions, data model, rate snapshot logic, the permission matrix) stayed with us. That distinction is the whole point.

The AI features inside Tikr are narrowly scoped. Time-entry descriptions can be cleaned up before save (you review, you save). Blog-post angles can be suggested from anonymized weekly themes (client and project names are stripped before anything leaves the app). That is the list. There is no timesheet scoring, no productivity inference, no training on Konabos data, no AI deciding what is billable.

This is the same governance we ask clients to follow on their own stacks. If AI helped build it, a human owns it. If it runs in production, it is reviewed like any other system. If it drives a decision, it is validated. We wrote about why this matters in AI Is Rewriting Sitecore. Are We Ready? (opens in new tab), what happens when nobody enforces it in Nobody Is Stopping Me (opens in new tab), and what the identity-level answer looks like in practice in Your AI Agents Are Running Without Guardrails. Auth0 Has an Answer (opens in new tab).

07 / 08

What it costs to run

Harvest. $10 per user per month.

Tikr. $20 a month, all in.

Tikr is flat-fee. Harvest was per-seat. For our fifty-person team that gap is hundreds of dollars every month, and it widens with every hire. (Hosting, database, email, AI features.)

The real cost of Tikr is not the bill. It is the time we spend building and maintaining it. We think that is worth it because the tool fits the work, and because what we learn building Tikr (about AI in production tools, about multi-tenant architecture, about the operations of a services firm) flows directly into the client work we ship.

08 / 08

Where Tikr is going

We build Tikr in phases. We work on what is most useful next, and we ship when it is good enough to use. No hard dates.

Recently shipped

  • Country-aware public holidays
  • Team-level region settings
  • Project-level allocation
  • Admin dashboard with profitability and compliance tabs
  • Blog-post suggestions from time entries

Up next

  • Expense tracking with receipt capture
  • Time-off and PTO requests with approvals and accruals
  • Recurring invoices and retainer tracking
  • Project Gantt with dependencies and milestones

On the horizon

  • Online payment collection (Stripe and PayPal)
  • Deeper accounting sync (QuickBooks, Xero)
  • Public REST API and webhooks
  • Skills-based resourcing and scenario forecasting
  • More integrations across the systems we and our clients already use

Most companies are still renting their operating system. We stopped. If you want to compare notes on what that’s actually like, find Akshay on LinkedIn (opens in new tab).