Internal Product · We Drink Our Own Kava
We built our own
timesheet portal.
Using Claude + AWS.
Over a weekend.
We tell clients to automate the repetitive. Then we checked our own processes and found coordinators manually chasing the team every Friday for hours. So we got Claude to build the fix. Deployed it on AWS. Done. The result is what we now use internally — every day.
Why this matters
We build internal tools the same way we build client tools — no shortcuts, no spreadsheets, no workarounds. If we wouldn't ship it to a client, we don't use it ourselves. This is what that looks like in practice.
32.5
Hrs this week
3
Active projects
4
Team members
This week — team hours
Alex Reed
Salesforce CRM
8.5h
Sarah Jenkins
QA Project
4.0h
Michael Smith
Marketing Auto
8.5h
Stack
Built by Claude
Node.js + React frontend
AWS EC2 hosted
Slack API reminders
Role-based access
Built in one weekend
The Problem We Had
We were telling clients to automate. Then we looked at ourselves.
A coordinator manually pinging the team on Slack every Friday: "Did you log your hours?" An admin manually cross-referencing a spreadsheet to compile billing reports. A PM with no visibility into which developer was on which project. All fixable. None fixed.
Hours tracked in a shared spreadsheet with no structure
No access control. Devs could see everyone's entries. Admins had to scroll through hundreds of rows to find the week they needed. No validation — people entered whatever format they felt like.
Manual Slack pings every Friday at 4pm
Someone had to manually message every team member who hadn't logged. That someone was usually the most senior person available — spending 20 minutes on a task that should take zero.
Billing reports took hours to compile
At month end, someone was manually pulling data from the sheet, checking it against project lists, removing duplicates, and formatting it for invoicing. Every single month. Never got faster.
The Portal — Live Look
What Amroar's team logs hours in — every day.
Role-based views, real-time dashboards, project breakdowns, and full admin control. Built by Claude and deployed on AWS — fully owned, zero vendor lock-in.
Team Hours (Week)
128.5
+8% vs last week
Active Projects
3
1 completed this month
Missing Today
2
Slack reminder sent
Logged Today
2/4
Alex, Sarah logged ✓
Team Hours This Week All members
Project Breakdown This week
Salesforce CRM
52.5h
Marketing Automation
35h
Test QA Project
21h
Hogwarts Internal
8h
Date
Team Member
Project
Hours
Status
Mar 19
Alex Reed
Salesforce CRM
8.5h
Logged
Mar 19
Sarah Jenkins
QA Project
4.0h
Logged
Mar 19
Michael Smith
—
—
Missing
Mar 19
Emily Davis
—
—
Missing
Mar 18
Michael Smith
Marketing Auto
8.5h
Logged
Mar 18
Emily Davis
Salesforce CRM
6.0h
Logged
Log Your Hours
⚡ Try Live in Action
Hours logged successfully.
Automated 2pm Slack Reminder
Amroar Timesheets
2:00 PM
Hi @michael.smith — it's 2pm! Don't forget to log your hours in the Amroar Timesheet portal today. 🕒
This reminder was sent automatically. Hours still not logged as of 2pm.
This reminder was sent automatically. Hours still not logged as of 2pm.
Monitoring for log entry…
Role-based access — admin, PM, dev
Admins see everything. PMs see full team activity. Developers see only their own entries. JWT-based auth built with Claude from scratch — no auth library dependencies, no third-party overhead.
Automated absence detection — runs daily
A time-triggered script checks at 2pm whether each employee has logged for the day. Anyone missing gets a personalised Slack message. No coordinator intervention needed.
SQLite on AWS EC2 — fully owned data
The entire backend runs on a Node.js API hosted on AWS EC2 with a SQLite database. All data stays within Amroar's own infrastructure. No third-party SaaS, no usage limits, no data sharing.
What Changed
From Friday chaos to fully automated.
The same principles we apply to every client engagement — automate the repeatable, give everyone the right view of data, eliminate manual overhead — applied to ourselves first.
0
Manual Slack pings sent by a human since deployment
100%
Time logging compliance — tracked, verified, automated
1
Weekend — total build time from idea to production
AWS
Hosted on EC2 — fully owned, fully controlled infrastructure
Gone
Manual Friday hour-chase ritual
A time-triggered script fires at 2pm daily. Everyone who hasn't logged gets a Slack message from the portal. No human involved at any point.
Live
Admin dashboard with real-time visibility
Admins see the full team at a glance — who's logged, who's missing, which projects are consuming time, and how the week compares to the last.
Auto
Month-end billing report — one click
The sheet is structured data. Billing reports filter by project, by date, by team member — and export in the format accounting needs. No manual rebuild every month.
Scoped
Developers only see their own data
Role-based views mean developers can't see what colleagues are billing. PMs see project-level data. Admins see everything. Right data to the right person.
Why It Matters to You
If we build this for ourselves on a weekend, imagine what we can build for your business.
The Amroar Timesheet Portal isn't a product we sell. It's proof of how we think — automate the repetitive, eliminate the manual, give everyone exactly the view they need. We apply this logic to every client engagement we take on.
Senior architects on the call. Not a junior consultant.
01
We only recommend what we use ourselves
Claude to build it, AWS to host it, Slack API for notifications — tools we trust because we run our own operations on them. Not because they're on a vendor shortlist.
02
We scope to solve the problem, not to maximise the build
A timesheet portal built by Claude over a weekend doesn't need a complex infrastructure or a bloated tech stack. We scoped the right solution, generated the code with Claude, and deployed it on AWS. Same approach for every client.
03
No failed builds — internal or client-side
The portal runs in production every day. That's the standard we hold ourselves to. Zero failed builds applies to what we ship internally just as much as to what we deliver to clients.