A quick look at how Time By Ping contextualizes your Activity to automate as much of your day as possible.
In our mission to automate your time, we aim to take as many timekeeping tasks off your hands as possible. Using our intelligent predictive services and machine learning technology to auto-complete Timesheet Entries for as much of your daily activity as possible, Time by Ping (TBP) frees up more time for you to spend with intention.
In this article we look at how TBP automatically captures and contextualizes your timekeeping, what information we can automate, and how TBP knows what information to assign to each Activity.
What information can Time by Ping automate?
Once your Client / Matter has been loaded from the Practice Management System (PMS) into TBP, we can start to predict and assign specific information to your Activities, including:
- Client / Matters
- Narratives
- Work Codes
And don’t forget – you can easily edit any of these whenever you want.
How does Time by Ping know what information to assign to each Activity?
We use a mixture of predictive technology and rules to determine what information is relevant and should be added to your captured Activities. When TBP captures an Activity it predicts a Client / Matter, applies Narrative rules, and predicts Work Codes.
How TBP knows what information to fill in depends on the type of information we’re predicting:
Client / Matter
TBP tries to predict the Client / Matter for all document and email Activity and will only assign it when we’re at least 70% certain it’s correct. TBP uses machine learning technology to check which predictions were accurate and which weren’t, and continues to learn and improve its information accuracy every time you release your time.
Currently, TBP predicts a Client / Matter for Activities that are saved directly into your firm's Document Management System (DMS) or Activities carried out in Microsoft Word and emails read and sent via Microsoft Outlook.
Any other Activities will show in your Timeline as ‘Unassigned’ so you can manually assign them to the Client / Matter you were working on.
When it comes to predicting a Client / Matter, TBP takes one of two routes:
- It uses the Document Management System
Every time you file your documents or emails in your firm’s Document Management System (DMS), TBP knows this, sees the Client / Matter attached to each file and then assigns it to each associated Activity. This takes precedence over our Matter Categorization model.
At the moment, TBP is compatible with the iManage DMS.
- Or it uses metadata
If TBP doesn’t find the relevant information in the DMS, it instead looks at the key metadata in each Activity and uses this to assign the Client / Matter.
Here’s the metadata we look at:
| Microsoft Word Documents | Microsoft Outlook Emails |
|
The document title |
The subject line |
|
|
Who the email is to and from |
Narrative
Once a Client / Matter is assigned manually or automatically, TBP fills in the Narrative for each Activity. We format each default Narrative like this:
-
Calls: Telephone conference with [name / number]
- For internal calls with someone in your Active Directory, we add the name
- For external calls, or where the name is not available, we add the number
- Documents: Analyze and prepare [document title]
-
Emails: Correspondence with [email recipients] regarding [email subject line]
- Email recipients listed in the narrative include names in the ‘To:’ box in Outlook. When the email is a reply thread, the narrative will also include the ‘CC’ Recipients.
- Received email participants are those who sent the email
-
Meetings: Conference with [meeting attendees] regarding [meeting title]
- Meeting attendees only include those ‘required’ to attend, not ‘optional’ attendees
- Research: Research regarding [website URL]
-
Window tracking: [Application Name]
- For those Activities we capture at a window level, we’ll show you the application you were working in, such as Microsoft OneNote
If your firm has customized its default Narratives, they may appear slightly differently to how you see them here.
Work Codes
Where required, after the Narrative is filled in, TBP assigns Work Codes based on those assigned to that Client / Matter in the PMS.
What happens if TBP isn’t certain the information is correct?
If a Client / Matter prediction by TBP doesn’t meet our 70% threshold for certainty, we’ll leave it to you to assign the Activity and will show it as Unassigned in your Timeline.
It’s important an Activity is assigned, as without a Client / Matter you can’t bill for it. Once assigned, TBP also conveniently and automatically fills in your Narratives and Work Codes for you.
