R&D team for Oitchau, an HR tech time & attendance tracking app

Rebbix joined Oitchau, a then-startup and now an enterprise-level time tracking & timesheet platform Day.io, as an R&D team to help build and launch two time & attendance mobile apps for small companies in Brazil. The main challenge of this phase was to effectively confirm that a particular person was in a particular place at a particular time.

The choice of country for launching this MVP was not coincidental: employee time theft is a common occurrence in Brazil, and local labor laws are largely employee-centric, costing many domestic and international companies significant money in labor settlements. The focus on micro and small businesses (under 10 employees) was not coincidental either: they make up 98.5% of all Brazilian companies and account for 41% of the total payroll. 

We’ve crossed many big milestones with Oitchau/Day.io since the MVP stage, and our cooperation is still ongoing.

Key outcome

• 3 months to run R&D and build and launch an MVP

What we did

• R&D: we researched three ways to confirm a person’s location for companies to choose from:
  • Bluetooth beacons — highly secure option but one that required companies to purchase beacons
  • WiFi network metadata — reliable and widely available option that required initial configuration
  • GPS — fallback option as it’s easy to manipulate and unreliable on cheap phones
• Development of a complex system that included an iOS and an Android app for employees, an admin panel for company management and support, sign-up and team management functionality, and basic payroll report generation
• Development of a sophisticated data synchronization mechanism that enabled the mobile apps to remain fully operational while offline (important since the internet connection in Brazil is often unstable)

Team setup

• 1 Engineering Manager
• 1 iOS Engineer
• 1 Android Engineer
• 1 Back-End Engineer