Spindogs x Resource Guru: Boosting billable time & team efficiency

Founded in 2004, Spindogs is a full-service digital agency delivering bespoke solutions for global clients in housing, education, automotive, professional services, membership and transport.

In conversation with us, Hannah Cook-Fuller, Program Manager at Spindogs, shared that she had been working at the agency for four years before she discovered Resource Guru—the solution to a sticky set of outdated tools and processes.

Read on for more of Hannah’s story ⬇️

Spindogs before Resource Guru: A struggle with Google Sheets

Manual processes and tricky tracking

Spindogs was stuck in spreadsheets. They relied heavily on Google Sheets for their agency resource management and planning. With a growing team, there was a growing desire for efficiency that a basic solution like Google Sheets couldn’t deliver on. 

 

According to Hannah, it became “impossible” to keep track of work. The team were facing two main obstacles with Google Sheets: they were held back by how much data they could work with, and they were stuck in the present instead of planning for the future. They were in need of dedicated agency resource scheduling software. 

Difficulty maneuvering through multiple projects

With a growing team, the number of projects the agency was working on naturally increased. As anyone who’s worked agency-side will tell you, you need a dynamic way to roll with the punches and make last-minute changes when you’re juggling multiple clients and projects. 

In Hannah’s words:

 

Google Sheets wasn’t fit for purpose here, especially when the team wanted to move projects between sheets or teams, when they wanted easy access to project data, or when they wanted to share that data internally.

Lackluster analytics and reporting

Without access to the right information, it’s hard to make the right business decisions. Spindogs were hungry for more insight into how the team was really spending time, how they were being utilized, and what additional agency revenue-earning potential the team had. 

 

With their old set-up, Hannah says the team had to do a lot of “detective work” to find the answers they needed, leading to inefficiencies and potential missed opportunities. 

Spindogs with Resource Guru: Better visibility and workload balance

A flexible approach to project hurdles

Nowadays, even when last-minute changes come up within Spindogs’ projects, the team is able to preempt them and protect their time, no matter where they work: 

Now that Spindogs can accurately keep track of shifting project demands, they can more effectively manage where they’re spending their time and effort. With that, they’re no longer slowed down by the unexpected, and can continue to make progress on their projects.

A more efficient, balanced Spindogs team

Since implementing Resource Guru, the Spindogs team is able to better balance their workloads, despite their increased client demand: 

“We are not overbooking, and we are actually creating breathing room in the workday which was invisible before.”

As well as those being scheduled, those making decisions about the agency team’s workload have also reaped the benefits: 

The time Spindogs has gotten back now they’ve got a better balanced team and understanding of performance means they can reinvest their time effectively and stay productive, without overloading individuals. 

A clearer picture of billable time

With better visibility over how the team’s spending time, Spindogs has seen major improvements in their revenue-earning activities: 

This added insight lets Spindogs see how much time they’re spending on tasks that directly affect the agency’s bottom line.

They’ve been able to maximize their agency profit-making capacity and better understand what lies ahead for the business:

“We’ve only been fully up and running with it a couple of months, but we have seen an increase in the amount of billable time logged and we can better forecast our performance.”

It’s not always easy to make these projections but, with the help of Resource Guru, Spindogs now make the most of their data to help prioritize billable work that makes an impact on their bottom line. 

Key features valued by Spindogs

The Schedule

“I believe the usability of Resource Guru has really made the experience as smooth as possible for us.”

By design, the Schedule is both flexible and approachable to facilitate easy updates and help you understand workloads at a glance: 

• Drag and drop to rearrange bookings and rebalance workloads 
• Use the availability bar or turn on heatmap views to scan capacity
• Find key dates and deadlines with milestones
• Use color coding to find particular projects, clients, bookers, activity types, or billable time
• Filter, sort, and group to see what’s scheduled, and organize the exact team members you’re looking for
• Integrate with Outlook and Google Calendar to tie all the team’s bookings together

Resource Guru also ranked #1 for usability in the G2 Winter 2025 Report in the resource management software category.

The waiting list and clash management

“The waiting list feature highlights when we need to have a conversation or make a decision about a project. As a result, we are no longer oversubscribing people.”

The waiting list, a part of Resource Guru’s approach to clash management, is a unique way to battle overbooking. 

As well as the more traditional option of adding extra work with overtime, you get the option to use the waiting list. 

Bookings on the waiting list are unconfirmed bookings—the person or resource in question doesn’t currently have enough availability to accommodate the booking. 

By adding bookings to the waiting list you can keep track of them and rearrange them by moving them to another date, or another person or resource. You also have the option to reduce the booking’s duration to a point where it fits within the existing availability.

That way, you can stay on top of the workload, without overloading individuals. This lets you plan work—even when there’s not enough availability—and identify any issues well ahead of time.

Reports

“This feature is a game changer for us. With it, we’re getting insights at speed. It’s also very easy to use, which has helped us get the benefits out of it right away.”

The Reports section lets you easily view utilization rates, understand how much capacity you have, and really drill down into the numbers.

There’s plenty to explore, but here are some highlights: 

• Analyze people and resources, projects, clients and activity types
• Breakdown the data by date range to explore by week, month, quarter, year, or a custom range
• Filter by custom field to isolate your results, whether you want a report on a specific region, department, or something completely different, the options are virtually endless
• Use downloadable reports to get even more granular and further slice and dice the data

Spindogs’ experience with customer success

On top of these features, Spindogs shared appreciation for the team’s approach to handling the agency’s requests:

More about Hannah and Spindogs

In her role as a program manager at the agency, Hannah identifies and delivers projects that aim to improve performance. She takes a holistic view, scouting for areas she can make a positive change. You can find her on LinkedIn. 

Try it for yourself

Whether you want to make your team as efficient as possible or explore where you can spend more time on revenue-generating tasks, try a 30 day free trial to see the benefits for your business: