Trusted time-tracking and billing

Time tracking and billing is an administrative process that requires secure identities and trust between organisations. Take health care for instance: health workers, patients and health care insurance companies have to track and approve worked hours and arrange payments. The plan is to create a dapp that will allow these parties to perform their tasks as efficiently as possible in a secure and user-friendly way.

The above is only one use case. We will build a framework of time tracking and billing that will be applicable to many use cases, for instance companies that pay free-lancers for IT development work. In addition to secure time tracking and payments it will be possible for companies to put up funds in escrow accounts for payments. Funds will be released if the worker and approver sign of on the hours worked or on other agreements made. If there is no sign-off, funds are returned. This increases the likelyhood that the worker will receive his/her money. Also, because of this incentive, overall, the change of success for the deal increases.

Funds that are in escrow accumulate interests (by lending out to other defi platforms). This additionial profit will be paid to the worker, or, if work is not delivered, returned to the company that put up the funds.

A trusted framework will require digital identities on Cardano, tokens to register and exchange assets (hours worked) and smart contracts to execute payments and put funds in escrow accounts.

The advantages of using a decentralized network above a centralized solution are:

- Transactions (hours registered, payments) are stored decentrally (at least hashes) making it more difficult to tamper with data. Blockchains have a strong auditing capability.

- Using a trusted blockchain network will make it easier to convince new organizations to connect and trust existing parties that are already tracking hours or executing payments on Cardano.

- Smart contracts will ensure predictable and correct payment behaviour.

- Cardano tokens and smart contracts will offer a single technology that will make it easy for parties to exchange information (tokens) and execute smart contracts. Connecting parties can develop smart contracts with party-specific behavior. All this is possible in a centralized network, but the level of security, robustness and smart contract possibilities of a blockchain like Cardano are much higher.

- Self-sovereign identities will allow users to only share necessary details needed for tracking time and payments.

- Financial transactions will be global and fast. This will allow for truly global tracking of work hours where hours can be tracked on one continent while payments are executed by an organization on the other side of the globe without the usual delays of money transfer. Yes, all this can be achieved by connecting centralized systems, but a decentralized solution will be superior, less chance of connection components failing, more trust and all parties are using the same platform to interface with each other.

- Blockchain tech offers possibilities to keep money for payments in escrow, generating extra money (staking, lending on other defi platforms).

The first phase consists of more validation with workers and organisations to verify the proposal and to design and build a prototype using the features of the existing Project Hours time tracking app. This will help designing the right processes and, very importantly, implement the requirements of our customers in the best way.

We want to achieve this in a period of three months with one person working on this full time to design and build the prototype dapp. The other team members will help designing processes and validating the idea with other organisations. Of course the team size and roles can change, this is a first proposal. The requested funds are needed to sustain one person working on this full-time for 3 months without income from other activities (will take unpaid leave from current job).

After the first phase we will evaluate the validation results and prototype and plan next phases in detail.

Presentation with a high level use case described: https://1drv.ms/p/s!Am8N2js26XiCj7g9zj-WCaBtq7ssvA?e=t19wpO

Team members:

Bert-Jan Lappenschaar https://www.linkedin.com/in/bjlappenschaar/

Robert-Jan van Es https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertjanvanes/

Imre de Groot https://www.linkedin.com/in/imre-de-groot-04655529/

High level initial road map:

- 3 months: working prototype with technology selected, time tracking functionality and basic smart contracts in place

- 6 months: pilot projects with customers, identity framework added, implementation of smart contracts.

- 12 months: test with customers, complete minimum viable functionalities, commercial roll-out to first customers

A lot of refinement needed, comments are welcome!

- Find out exactly what technologies to use

- More detailed business process flow

Thanks Marco Mirabella from the Ensuro project to think along with us!