New: Funder-ready progress reports, drafted from your own project log. See how →
For researchers & teaching academics est. on a Friday marking deadline

Tools for Academics,
Not for Administrators.

AcademicStaff takes grant reporting, teaching admin, marking logistics and committee paperwork off your desk — so the hours you fought to protect go into research, writing and students. Not into a spreadsheet named budget_FINAL_v7_ACTUAL.xlsx.

Start free — no card required See it in 3 minutes

Free for individual academics, forever. No procurement committee required — imagine that.

A lecture theatre of students, attention on the front of the room
Semester 2, Week 9. Your unit outline, marking, and workload return — already handled. 4.2 hrs saved this week
Trusted by academics at 40+ universities Syncs with ORCID, your calendar & your VLE Your data stays yours — export everything, any time Built by ex-postdocs who kept the receipts
16.4h
average week our users report losing to admin before switching
11×
the same publication list, retyped for grants, reviews and promotion — now entered once
3 min
to draft a funder progress report from your running project log
0
timesheets we will ever ask you to fill in. We're on your side of the desk
Figures from AcademicStaff onboarding surveys and product telemetry, 2025–26. Your mileage may vary; your committee load, sadly, may not.
An academic working alone at a desk, focused on a laptop
“The university gives you a research day, then quietly fills it with everything that isn't research.” — every corridor conversation, every department, everywhere
The problem §1

You didn't spend seven years on a doctorate to chase purchase orders.

Somewhere between the third ethics amendment and the fourth request to “just update the spreadsheet,” the job you trained for became the thing you do after hours. We built AcademicStaff for exactly that gap.

  • §1.1

    Grant admin eats the grant

    You won the funding. Congratulations — now spend a day a month proving you're spending it correctly, in a different template for every funder, due the week your marking is due.

  • §1.2

    Teaching load lives in nine places

    Unit outlines in one system, timetables in another, workload allocation in a PDF from March, and the actual truth in your head. None of them agree.

  • §1.3

    Service work vanishes without a trace

    Committees, reviews, examining, mentoring — hours of genuine contribution that appear nowhere when promotion asks you to “evidence institutional citizenship.”

  • §1.4

    Marking season is a logistics crisis

    Two hundred scripts, three moderators, one rubric interpreted four ways, and a feedback deadline that assumes you don't sleep. The marking is the job; the coordination shouldn't be.

† We are not against administrators — good ones are gold. We're against academics being conscripted as unpaid ones.

What you get §2

One workspace for the five jobs you're actually doing.

Research, teaching, funding, service, and the publication treadmill — each with its own quiet machinery, all feeding one honest picture of your working life.

✎

Grant Command

Track budgets, milestones and deliverables per project. When a report falls due, AcademicStaff drafts it from your running log in the funder's own template — you edit, you don't excavate.

In practice: quarterly report drafted in 3 minutes, from notes you'd already written.
▤

Teaching Workload

Every unit, cohort, guest lecture and repeat delivery in one ledger. Reuse last year's outline in two clicks, and export a workload return that matches reality instead of the March PDF.

In practice: semester planning in an afternoon, not a fortnight of email archaeology.
✓

Marking Desk

Rubric-first marking with reusable feedback banks, live moderation between markers, and progress you can actually see. Consistent grades, faster feedback, fewer 1am sessions.

In practice: feedback turnaround down 40% across a 240-student unit.
❡

Publication Pipeline

Drafts, submissions, revise-and-resubmits and acceptances tracked as a pipeline, synced with ORCID. Your outputs list stays current — for grants, reviews, REF/ERA returns, and the website you keep meaning to update.

In practice: enter each paper once. Reuse it everywhere, formatted correctly.
§

Service Ledger

Committee seats, peer reviews, examining, mentoring — logged as they happen, tallied by hours and impact. When promotion asks for evidence of citizenship, you print it.

In practice: promotion case assembled in a day, with five years of receipts.
◷

The Week, Defended

A weekly view that blocks research time first and shows exactly where the rest goes. Politely declines meeting invitations that collide with your writing block. You're welcome.

In practice: research days that survive contact with the timetable.
Working together §2.7

Built for the lab, the unit team, and the co-authors in three time zones.

Share a project with your research group and everyone sees the same milestones, the same budget position, the same deadlines. Co-teaching a unit? The marking desk splits scripts, tracks moderation, and keeps the rubric honest across markers.

  • Shared project logs your co-investigators actually read
  • Marking allocation and moderation across teaching teams
  • Role-based access — the grants office sees reports, not your drafts
  • Every change attributed, every export timestamped
A research team gathered around a laptop, working through a project together
How it works §3

Quietly useful from the first afternoon.

No migration project. No training day with sandwiches. You start with the thing that's currently on fire.

1

Bring one project

Import a grant from your funder's award letter, a unit from your outline, or your publication list from ORCID. Five minutes, one thing, done.

2

Log as you go

A line or two when something happens — a milestone hit, a meeting held, scripts marked. AcademicStaff files it against the right project, budget and workload category automatically.

3

Reports write themselves

Funder updates, workload returns, promotion evidence, output lists — generated from what you already logged, in the format each audience demands. You review; nothing leaves without your say-so.

A note on your data: your notes, drafts and logs are yours. Export everything to open formats at any time, delete your account without a retention committee, and we never sell, mine or “share with partners.” We read our own terms of service. Both pages.
From the corridor §4

Academics on what changed.

“

My ARC progress report used to be a lost weekend. Last quarter I opened AcademicStaff, read a draft assembled from my own project log, fixed two sentences, and went back to the actual research it described.

RN
Assoc. Prof. Rachel NgataMarine Ecology · Research Group Lead
“

Co-ordinating marking across four tutors used to mean forty emails and a shared drive of despair. Now the rubric, the allocation and the moderation live in one place — and feedback went out nine days earlier.

DO
Dr. David OkonkwoSenior Lecturer, Economics · Unit Coordinator, 240 students
“

I put together my promotion case in a day because five years of committee work, reviewing and mentoring was already logged. My mentor asked how long the evidence appendix took. I lied and said a week.

EM
Dr. Elena MarchettiSenior Research Fellow, Public Health
An academic at a desk by a window, deep in focused work
The point of all this §5
“The best measure of academic software isn't features. It's whether, at 4pm on a Thursday, you're writing your paper — or writing about your paper for a form that nobody reads.”
The AcademicStaff team — recovering postdocs, sessional survivors, and one former grants officer who defected.
Pricing §6

Priced like we've seen a research budget.

Free for individuals, forever. Paid tiers when your group or department wants in — each one cheaper than the admin time it replaces in the first week.

Academic

For one researcher or lecturer, and the whole beautiful mess of their working life.
$0 forever
  • Unlimited projects, units & logs
  • Publication pipeline + ORCID sync
  • Service ledger & promotion evidence export
  • The Week, Defended
  • Full data export, always
Start free
Most popular

Research Group

For labs and teaching teams — shared projects, shared marking, shared sanity.
$9 per person / month
  • Everything in Academic
  • Shared grant & project workspaces
  • Marking Desk with moderation across markers
  • Funder-template report drafting
  • Priority support from humans with PhDs
Start 30-day trial

Department

For heads of school who'd rather their staff researched than reconciled.
Custom annual, invoiced once
  • Everything in Research Group
  • Workload returns & REF/ERA-ready reporting
  • SSO, provisioning & role-based access
  • Onboarding run by us, not a PDF
  • Procurement paperwork — we'll fill it in
Talk to us

‡ Yes, the free tier is actually free. Academics have been burned by “free” before; we know, we were there.

Questions §7

Asked, frequently, and fairly.

Is this another system my university will make me use?
The opposite. AcademicStaff is chosen by academics, for themselves — the free tier needs no approval, no IT ticket, no procurement cycle. If your department later adopts it, that's them catching up with you.
Does it replace my VLE, ORCID, or reference manager?
No — it sits above them. Your VLE keeps delivering content, ORCID stays your public record, your reference manager keeps your library. AcademicStaff is the layer where your workload, deadlines and evidence come together, and it syncs with those systems rather than fighting them.
Who can see my data? My head of school? The grants office?
Nobody you haven't explicitly invited. Your workspace is private by default. On shared plans, access is role-based and visible — you always know who can see what, and reports go out only when you send them. Your drafts, notes and logs are never training data and never for sale.
I'm sessional / on a fractional contract. Is this for me?
Especially for you. The free tier covers unlimited units and the service ledger — so the invisible hours you put in are documented, portable, and yours to take to the next contract negotiation. Your record shouldn't reset every time your employment does.
What happens to my data if I leave — or you shut down?
Everything exports to open formats (CSV, Markdown, BibTeX) with one click, any time, on every tier. If we ever wind down, you get 12 months' notice and a full export. We built this because academics deserve tools that respect them; that includes the exit.
How long does setup honestly take?
Bring one project and you're working in about five minutes. Most people import a grant or a unit on day one and add the rest as it comes up. There is no “implementation phase.” We've sat through those too.

Get your week back.
The bureaucracy will cope.

Start free in five minutes. Bring one grant, one unit, or one publication list — and see what the term looks like when the admin runs itself.

Start free — no card required Explore the features
Free forever for individual academics · Cancel anything in one click · Export everything, always
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