Away with the paper economy, here with the app: DiTom Kanaltechnik has founded a start-up together with IT young entrepreneurs and thus developed an app that enables digital time recording - simple and, for example, also easy to use on construction sites and in craft businesses.
Find out more about the innovation from Münsterland on this page.
DiTom GmbH Kanaltechnik from Ahlen is a qualified specialist company and rehabilitates public sewers and private drainage systems. Its customers include municipalities and private companies as well as private households.
clockin GmbH from Münster digitises the administrative processes of small and medium-sized enterprises. The start-up from Münster has not only developed an intuitive solution for time recording. The clockin app also includes digital order documentation, checklists and staff schedules. It has already received several awards for this.
Many craftsmen and craftswomen still have a paper economy: on the construction site, they enter their hours worked on a piece of paper, and these timesheets have to be digitally recorded later in the office. This not only eats up time, but is also prone to errors. That's why Thomas Bittmann, Managing Director of DiTom Kanaltechnik GmbH in Ahlen, looked for another solution for his field staff in 2015. But sometimes the systems were too complicated, sometimes too expensive. So a self-developed solution was needed. He found the necessary know-how with a partner company from Münster. Together with IT young entrepreneur Frederik Neuhaus, who had just returned to Münsterland from Silicon Valley, the planning began.
Together, Thomas Bittmann and Frederik Neuhaus started pilot projects with user companies. That was the birth of the clockin app. It was actually only developed for internal use in the sewer technology company. But the project was so successful that more and more companies came knocking. That's why Thomas Bittmann and Frederik Neuhaus founded clockin GmbH as a joint venture in 2018. The clockin app was developed for iPhone and Android devices and can be downloaded from the App Store or Google Play. If you want to use clockin in your own company, the software company offers a subscription model based on one, twelve or 24 months.
The demand was so great that numerous companies now use clockin. Among them are not only craft businesses, but also many other industries such as care services, logistics companies, wholesalers or consulting firms. In the meantime, companies from Germany, Austria and Switzerland have registered with clockin and solve their time recording, order documentation and almost the entire internal administration by means of clockin.
This is made possible by the office centre connected to the app, which clockin customers can access via their internet browser. In this way, employees can record their working hours both mobile and stationary and all information is available for administration directly in the office centre. Project and personnel management is also possible in the office centre. In this way, the software company wants to replace the entire and often paper-heavy administrative work of companies with digital solutions and thus provide small and medium-sized enterprises with a particularly easy entry into digitalisation.
Because the European Court of Justice ruled in 2019 that employers must set up a system to record the daily working hours of their employees, clockin expects to add many more customers in 2021.
As a regional joint initiative, Enabling Networks Münsterland supports companies and universities in the Münsterland region in developing innovations, implementing them and finding the right partners for the project. In order to show how innovative and at the same time cooperative Münsterland already is, the project also went in search of innovative cooperation projects from the region. The results are presented on this page. The Enabling Networks Münsterland project is funded by the European Union and the NRW Ministry of Economics as part of the ERDF call "Regio.NRW".