Before you buy any AI, find out what your people actually do all day.

Daytide is a small app for the computers in your firm. It notes which clients, projects and tools the working day goes into. After one week you get a plain picture of where the time goes, and a short list of what is worth changing first.

Start the 30-day trial See how the first week goes

TodayThursday 12 November, Marta, project lead

Why here
Left as general e-mail
- Outlook, 25 min
- Messages to four different clients, none longer than a few minutes
Short e-mail across several clients is not split up. It is counted as e-mail.
Why here
Sorted automatically, from your earlier answers
- Excel, 1 h 20: “Harbour Dental October figures”
- Word, 35 min, in the same folder: ~/Clients/Harbour Dental/2026-10
- On Tuesday you confirmed that this folder belongs to Harbour Dental Group
Wrong? Change it in one click. Daytide will not overwrite your correction.
Why here
You marked this time private
- 15 min
- Only the length is kept. Not the app, not the site, not the window.
Why here
Sorted automatically, from the meeting window
- Teams call, 1 h 05
- Window title: “Mill Lane School weekly”
- “Mill Lane” is on your client list
12:20 to 13:05AwayScreen locked, not counted45 min
Why here
Sorted automatically, from the file and folder
- Word, 1 h 25: “Mill Lane fee proposal v3”
- Folder: ~/Clients/Mill Lane School/Proposals
- A PDF from the same folder, 15 min
Why here
Not sorted. Daytide asks instead of guessing.
- A spreadsheet called “Q3 reconciliation”, 14 min
- xero.com, 11 min
- Two of your clients are in Xero and the file name does not say which
The question is in your chat with three answers to tap. If nobody answers in three days it expires and the time stays unsorted.
Why here
Sorted automatically, from a rule you approved
- PDF reader, 1 h 10: “Kessler supply agreement”
- Your rule: files with “Kessler” in the name belong to Kessler & Daughters
Rules are personal, visible in your settings and can be switched off.
Why here
Sorted automatically, from your earlier answers
- Excel, 30 min: “Harbour Dental October figures”
- Outlook, 20 min, messages about the same report

Working time: 7 h 30
Sorted without asking: 7 h 05
Private: 15 min
Questions waiting: 1

An example day, as the person whose day it is sees it. Pick an entry to see why Daytide put it there. All names and figures on this site are made up for illustration.

Everyone says “use AI”. Nobody says where.

You run a firm of fifteen people, or forty, or ninety. You keep hearing that AI will change your business. Perhaps you have already paid for a few licences. Some people use them. Most do not, and you cannot tell whether any of it made a difference.

The tools are not the hard part. The hard part is that nobody, you included, has an accurate picture of what the firm spends its days on. Timesheets get filled in on Friday from memory. A fixed-fee client quietly takes twice the time you priced. The same report is put together by hand every month because that is how it has always been done.

So start there. Measure one ordinary week. Once you can see where the hours go, the places worth changing tend to be plain, and some of them will have nothing to do with AI.

A week of short questions. Then it runs on its own.

Day one
Everyone installs a small app
It runs on Mac and Windows and sits in the menu bar or the tray. The first thing it shows each person is a plain notice of what it records and what it never records.
The first week
It watches, and asks
During calibration Daytide changes nothing by itself. It asks short questions in chat, five a day at most, and each one can be answered with a tap. Which client is this folder for? Is this tool client work?
From day eight
It gets on with it
On day seven it tells you what it learned and you correct what is wrong. After that it sorts the time it is sure about, shows its reasons, and asks two questions a day at most about the rest.

How it works, step by step

ChatPriya

Calibration, day 3 of 761% of time recognised

Daytide: Yesterday 40 minutes went to a spreadsheet called “Q3 reconciliation” and to xero.com. Which client is that for?

Harbour Dental Group
Kessler & Daughters
Something else
Internal

A calibration question. The answer is remembered, so the same thing is not asked twice.

Three questions you can answer after a week.

The owner's view is a weekly report in plain words and a list of what to look at. It is not a wall of charts.

Which clients take more time than they pay for?

Hours by client and project, for the whole team, set against last week. If a fixed-fee client took 96 hours, you will know, and you will know what the hours were spent on.

What does the firm spend its days doing?

Kind of work is counted separately from client: drafting, review, meetings, e-mail, admin. You can see how much of the week is the work you sell and how much is everything around it.

Where the time wentWeek of 9 November. Whole team, 14 people

Harbour Dental took 21 hours more than last week. Most of the increase is the monthly report: three people worked on the same spreadsheet.

Hours by client
By client	Hours	vs last week
Harbour Dental GroupOn a fixed monthly fee	96	+21
Mill Lane School	81	−4
Kessler & Daughters	64	+2
Nine smaller clients	112	−9
Internal and admin	74	+6
Unsorted	23
Total	450

By kind of work

Drafting and production188 h
E-mail79 h
Meetings71 h
Review58 h
Admin54 h

The weekly report shows the team as a whole. Per-person detail is switched off unless you turn it on, and your staff can see when it is on.

Which work is repetitive enough to hand to a machine?

When the same sequence of files and tools keeps coming back, Daytide lists it as an opportunity, with a rough number of hours a month and a suggestion in plain language.

Sometimes the suggestion is an AI tool. Sometimes it is a template, or a rule in software you already own. The list is where to look first. It is not a promise of savings.

OpportunitiesRepetitive work found this month

26hours a month, roughly
Copying figures from PDF statements into spreadsheets
Three people, most weekdays, the same PDF reader and Excel pattern
Worth trying: Document extraction with a person checking the result. Start with the one statement format you see most.
14hours a month, roughly
Assembling the monthly client report by hand
The same five files opened in the same order, twelve times a month
Worth trying: A report template that pulls the figures in, so the hour goes into the commentary.
9hours a month, roughly
Retyping meeting notes into the project tool
Notes app, then the project tool, within ten minutes of most calls
Worth trying: A meeting summariser that drafts the notes for you to correct and file.

Is this spying on my staff?

It is a fair question, and the honest answer depends on how it is built and how you use it.

Daytide records which apps, documents and sites are used for work, and for how long. It was built so that it cannot do the things that make monitoring software hated: no screenshots, no record of typing, no reading of messages or files.

Each person sees everything recorded about them, with the reason for every label, and can correct it. What you see as the owner is the team: time by client, project and kind of work. If you want detail per person, that is a setting you have to switch on, and your staff will see that you did.

Recorded

Which app is in front
The window title, cleaned
The web address, without the tail
The document’s folder and name
When, and for how long

Never recorded

Screenshots or screen recording
Keystrokes, mouse movement, the clipboard
What is inside your files, e-mails or messages
Camera or microphone
Anything inside a private or incognito window

The full list of what is recorded A page written for your team

What it will not do.

It is not accurate on day one: In the first days it recognises part of the work and asks about the rest. It marks what it is unsure of and leaves it unsorted. Expect to correct some entries early and few later.
It cannot see work away from the computer: Phone calls, site visits and meetings in a room leave a gap in the day. Daytide asks about the gap in chat, and one tap fills it.
It does not replace a timer that already works: If your team's timesheets are accurate and on time, keep them. Toggl and Harvest cost less. Daytide is for firms where the timesheets are not accurate, and for owners who want to know what the time went on.
It is not for checking up on one person: The owner's view shows the team. Detail per person is off unless you switch it on, and your staff can see when it is. There is also a stricter Detailed mode, where a reviewer signs off each person's day. That is a choice you make openly during setup, and it is not the default.

Set up for your kind of firm.

Daytide starts with a template for your line of work: the tools you are likely to use, the usual kinds of work, and the questions worth asking in the first week.

$19 a seat, and 30 days to see if it earns it.

Launch pricing, in US dollars, per seat per month when billed annually.

Team$19: The automatic record and the weekly picture.
Firm$32: Everything in Team, plus the list of what to fix and the stricter mode.

The trial is 30 days because the first seven are calibration. A shorter trial would end before you had seen anything useful.

Compare the two plans Assisted onboarding, $250

Questions owners ask first.

Do I have to tell my staff?

Yes. In several countries and US states the law requires written notice before any monitoring starts, and in every country it is the decent thing to do.

Daytide does part of this for you. The first time the app runs, each person sees a plain notice of what is recorded and what is not, and has to acknowledge it before anything is recorded. The acknowledgment is stored. You should still talk to your team first. We wrote a page you can send them.

Will my people hate it?

Some will be wary, and that is reasonable. What helps: they see their own record before anyone else does, private windows and personal sites are left alone, there is a pause button, and they stop filling in timesheets.

If the plan is to use it to discipline people, expect resistance. In the EU, expect legal trouble as well.

Where does our data go? We handle client files.

Daytide reads the names of files, window titles and web addresses. It does not read what is inside them. Personal details are removed on the computer before anything is sent, and again on the server.

The AI work is done by Anthropic (Claude models). Before anything reaches a model a stricter filter runs once more, so the model sees cleaned titles, site names and folder names. Each firm's data is kept apart from every other firm's.

Do we need someone technical to set this up?

No. The setup is eight short steps, most of them a single choice, and the app installs like any other. If you would like company, assisted onboarding is a 60 to 90 minute session with a person for $250.

Give it one normal week.

Install it, answer a handful of questions, and look at the picture on day seven. The trial runs for 30 days, so you see three more weeks after that before you decide anything.

Start the 30-day trial See pricing

No card needed to start. Want someone to set it up with you? Assisted onboarding is $250, credited to your first annual invoice.