Laurel Review: Features, Integrations, and Pricing 2023
Laurel is one software that helps businesses actualize the expression, “Time is money”. It’s no news that many legal and professional businesses bill clients by the hour. Without time-tracking software like Laurel, these services can inaccurately bill clients for the work performed.
Besides helping users take complete control of their time, Laurel gives insight into which tasks are most profitable. Laurel aims to help companies allocate resources, manage costs, and maintain accurate billing. Therefore, this article provides a complete Laurel review. Here, we will discuss Laurel’s features, pricing, and terms of service to know if it’s an indispensable tool for your legal or professional service.
Laurel Overview
Laurel is a timekeeping software that allows legal firms to focus on their work and capture more billable tasks. The company started as Time by Ping in 2017, intending to empower knowledge professionals (individuals who use their intellect to make money) to improve productivity in less time.
In a bid to define Time by Ping’s personality, the company launched Laurel in 2023. Although this name isn’t directly associated with time, it made it easy for the company to humanize its platform while enabling users to take inventory of their time quickly. With the introduction of Laurel, features like it introduced delegate support, Windows and Mac trackers, and revamped timers in the system.
The time management software also came with functionalities for categorizing time to harmonize work/life balance. Laurel’s mission is to help one billion people leverage their time.
Over the years, the company has raised about $55M in funding from top-notch investors, including Upfront Ventures, Acme Capital, Anthos, Initialized Capital, First Round Capital, and BoxGroup. In 2020, Laurel was recognized as one of the 100 Top Startups by Business Insider.
Top firms like Tonkon Torp LLP, Lerners Lawyers, and Wright Lindsey Jennings have embraced Laurel to free their team from draining administrative tasks, improve productivity, boost happiness, and create a collaborative work environment.
- Established: 2016
- Founder: Ryan Alshak
- Offices: United States
5 Core Features of the Laurel
Expert Opinion
Rating: 4.5/5
Laurel is a timekeeping software that uses AI to remove the burden of tracking time and provide analytics on time spent, giving insights into your billable hours.
As an AI-powered tool, Laurel works to free firms from the administrative and mental burden of manual timekeeping. At first glance, this time management system is easy to deploy. With features like glove training and ongoing professional team support, we seamlessly transitioned our timekeepers to Laurel.
To automate timekeeping for every professional, it offers varying degrees of solutions. For example, the platform’s organizational leaders solution focuses on helping companies increase profitability and billing velocity by days. Meanwhile, its professional solution helps individuals focus on high-value tasks without worrying about time.
Although the platform has different solution tiers, it would help if it also provided feature listings. Doing this can enable potential customers to identify which solution best matches their needs. One feature we found outstanding is Laurel’s timesheets. The tool provides review-ready and detailed timesheets. All a timekeeper needs to make final edits to timesheets before including them in the billing system.
You’ll likely appreciate Laurel’s Timeline View as a professional service looking to prioritize client relationships and deliver accurate bills. Through this functionality, your enterprise can organize its day chronologically, working with a comprehensive report of how you use time.
Laurel Notable Features
The following are some of Laurel’s most notable features:
1. Detailed Timesheets
Rather than spending hours filling out timesheets, Laurel provides ready-review timesheets, enabling employees to record more entries daily. It uses machine learning to provide insights into how much time they spend on specific projects. With this information, lawyers can save about one to two hours weekly to reduce burnout.
The platform’s timesheets have context for every task entry. All you need to do is select activities you want to bill for and create an accurate timesheet down to the second. This feature is also helpful for evaluating employees’ performance, as it lets you assess how your team allocates their time.
Considering it’s a legal requirement to maintain accurate timesheets, this software can help your firm’s timekeepers visualize their billing time in compliance with labor regulations.
2. Time Tracking
Laurel automatically collects all activities across the applications your firm uses to work. This feature notifies timekeepers of the tasks employees completed during work hours rather than having them give account personally. As a service-based business, you’ll find this feature helpful in tracking the time spent on different accounts or clients.
With Laurel’s time tracking feature, you can improve your billing process and understand how to allocate time to tasks properly. It allows employees to record their work hours by clocking in when they start tasks and clocking out when they finish.
This way, they can focus on work and live their best lives without worrying about timers. Using its time-tracking features, you can quickly fill in the blanks of your day by manually adding events or recording time away from your computer.
3. Timeline View
Viewing tasks according to how you complete them is vital to manage your work hours efficiently. This timekeeping software gives users visual summaries of daily, weekly, and monthly activities.
It allows lawyers to organize their day chronologically, giving them a holistic understanding of how time is used, billed, and distributed. Through Laurel’s timeline view, users can create to-do lists, breaking down their tasks into manageable steps.
4. Data Analytics and Reporting
Data is crucial for making informed business decisions. Laurel provides individual data analytics to help with decision-making and performance evaluation. While many timekeeping software functions to get your time into the billing system, Laurel reports where your most valuable asset is spent. With a more nuanced view of the rejected, billable, and released hours/minutes across various tasks, you can identify time-wasting activities.
5. Timekeeping Automation
Laurel makes it possible for firms to not only reclaim lost time but also buy time. To help maximize profit, the tool automates billable hours and granular time entries. Granular time entries involve recording time in detailed and specific increments, usually down to the smallest unit of time.
The software assists in creating and completing granular entries, making it easy to measure the time spent on each task accurately. Through this, your business can easily generate accurate client invoices, allocate resources more effectively, and better manage time. Laurel also automates the capture of every billable activity, making your time work for you.
Instead of manually preparing entries, it creates them in real-time, enabling you to record more entries daily. More task collection and analysis means timekeepers can send high-quality and compliant time entries into your billing system.
Laurel Integrations
With Laurel, your firm can enjoy effortless integration. The platform works seamlessly with any billing system. This way, you can deploy the software while your firm’s operation remains untouched. Since the timekeeping software is flexible to accommodate a business’s needs, it works excellently with tools like email clients, note-taking apps, calendars, and project management platforms.
The platform supports systems for legal professionals such as Thomson Reuters Elite Enterprise, Thomson Reuters ProLaw, Aderant, and Juris. Accounting professionals can integrate Laurel with leading platforms, including Thomson Reuters Practice CS, IRIS Star, CCH Practice Management (On-Prem), and CCH Axcess Practice (Cloud).
That said, here are other tools Laurel integrates with for various activity types:
- Microsoft Outlook Calendar
- Microsoft Word
- Excel
- PowerPoint
- Kofax and Adobe
- Google Chrome
- Microsoft Edge
- Microsoft Teams
- Zoom (calls and meetings)
Laurel Pricing and Plans
Laurel is excellent for professionals who bill by their time and create timesheets for client invoices. The platform doesn’t disclose its pricing and plans on its website. It prefers one-on-one conversations with potential customers to offer a tailored pricing plan. You need to contact its sales consultant to discuss time and money.
Once you click the “Get Started” button on Laurel’s website, it requires you to fill out a form detailing your firm’s name, email, phone number, and industry type. The company doesn’t list pricing details because it provides services based on the number of your firm’s timekeepers and business needs.
Terms and Policies
By using Laurel, you consent to its terms of agreement. Therefore, accessing the time management software mobile or desktop app lets it collect your email, phone number, postal address, and company data. Like many SaaS companies, Laurel prioritizes user privacy. It attempts to keep your personal activities private while helping you track tasks.
For example, when surfing the internet, the platform only collects your work on the websites you saved in your account settings. Since some of your personal activities may slip through the software, separating your tasks from work is best. That means you shouldn’t make private phone calls using your office desk phone while Laurel works in the background.
Laurel’s services are only suitable for persons over the age of 16. Keep in mind that the platform can share your information with service providers, vendors, and security personnel in good faith.
Customer Support
Laurel offers customers value-driven support via email, live chat, and a help center. The software’s live chat button is easy to notice, as it pops up on all of Laurel’s web pages. You can fill out the contact form via their website to book a demo or discuss its product with a sales consultant. Laurel’s help center covers frequently asked questions, feature updates, its time workflow, and more.
Besides, the platform has a blog page featuring articles about its product, value, team, and implementation process. Once you subscribe to the software, you can access its in-app automated support and education for a scaled first-class onboarding experience.
You can also reach Laurel through email at help@laurel.ai. You can also contact Laurel through its social media channels or visit the headquarters.
Corporate Headquarters
Laurel
345 California St, Suite 600
United States
Conclusion
As a business that bills by time, using a platform that obsesses over timekeeping is crucial. Laurel helps you build the timeline of your day, create accurate timesheets, organize your tasks, and make the most of your time. The tool is critical to helping firms increase their profitability. Businesses that deploy this timekeeping software can easily set priorities and avoid forgetting essential tasks, ultimately reducing employee stress.
You can request a demo to explore Laurel and how it can effectively harness your billing data.
Contributors: Yinka ODUFOTE (Technical Writer); Eyimofe ADEWOLE (Graphics Designer)
