Timesheet Parsing App
Work - - 2 min read
A native iOS app that parsed official timesheet PDFs and surfaced the attendance and hours data students actually cared about, built around systems that weren’t designed to help them.
Challenge
Students in the program were required to clock in and out of the building daily for compliance. With attendance needing to stay above 80% and a 750-hour threshold to hit, the stakes were real. But the lack of tools made it nearly impossible to know where you stood.
The management team provided access to timesheet PDFs through an internal web app, but it was slow, clunky, and built for record-keeping rather than student insight. It surfaced raw data with no sense of progress, no at-a-glance status, and no way to tell if you were falling behind until it was potentially too late. For a cohort with strict compliance requirements, that uncertainty added up.
Solution
A friend and I built Count to give students the clarity the existing system never offered. Students entered their badge ID once during onboarding; from there, the app fetched and parsed their official timesheet PDF in the background, automatically detecting their cohort to calculate hours correctly against the right targets. The app surfaced what actually mattered: total hours logged, hours missed, current attendance rate, and a clear picture of whether they were on track.
Four versions shipped over the project’s life: from a raw parsing prototype, to manual PDF import with cohort selection, to a fully automated background sync, and finally a polished UI/UX pass that made the experience feel native and considered.
Count was always a workaround, making the best of infrastructure we had no control over. That constraint planted a seed, and I built Clock Me In: a native app for clocking in and out directly from your phone, replacing the physical badge and entrance terminal entirely. The version we could have only dreamed of building the first time around.