Dropped QuickBooks by Building Own App on the My Hours API

Biggest Insecurity

Insecurity: She wasn’t sure she how was going to build her own app on My Hours data, or how My Hours would react.

‍After implementation: The My Hours API is there for exactly this. The agency now has a tool built around how it works, with My Hours at the center.

Company Introduction

Pointer Advertising is a full-service advertising agency in Raleigh, North Carolina, founded in 2005. The team covers marketing, branding, graphic design, programming, public relations and SEO, and has launched more than 300 brands and websites.

The agency is owner-led. The owner handles design and front-end coding herself and works with a small team of developers and specialists, who all log their time in the agency’s My Hours account. Every client is billed by the hour.

The Problem

My Hours handled the agency’s time tracking and invoices. But the owner also needed basic bookkeeping: printing checks and deposit slips, and recording who paid. For that, she used QuickBooks Desktop for Mac.

Then the renewal notice arrived. The new price was $1,351 a year, for software she used for a handful of tasks.

Situation Before Using My Hours API

1.
Every payment was recorded three times. In My Hours, in QuickBooks, and in a paper check register. QuickBooks and My Hours weren’t connected, so every invoice was also typed twice.

2.
She paid for far more than she used. The agency didn’t need QuickBooks’ reporting or advanced features. Just checks, deposit slips and a record of payments.

3.
Nothing else fit. She looked at online check-printing services, but she wanted something that ran on her own computer.

How Claude and the My Hours API Solved the Problem

The owner isn’t a programmer. She hand-codes HTML and CSS, but leaves the complex code to her developers. So she opened Claude and described her problem in plain words. She didn’t know if My Hours even had an API.

1.
No more QuickBooks renewal. The agency keeps the $1,351 a year.

2.
One place to record a payment instead of three.

3.
It looks like My Hours. She asked Claude to match the My Hours look, and it did, without any design files from her.

4.
About half the time on monthly invoicing. Her first invoicing run with the new app took about half as long, because nothing had to be entered twice.

What the app does

• Pulls invoices and customers from My Hours automatically, with no manual sync.
• Opens on unpaid invoices, so she sees who still owes the agency.
• Records deposits and links each one to the invoices it pays.
• Marks invoices as paid in My Hours when the money arrives.
• Prints checks and deposit slips from a template she can adjust.
• Keeps the check register and vendor list.
• Tracks contractor tax forms and reminds her before they’re due.

Try It Yourself

You don’t need to build an app to use My Hours with Claude. With the official My Hours connector, you can log time, check timesheets and find projects just by asking. See how in Time Tracking with Claude and AI Assistants.

If you need a tool My Hours doesn’t offer, you can build it on the My Hours API, like Pointer Advertising did. Test anything that touches you data, especially financial data before you rely on it.