I don’t know that this is the case, but I’d be surprised if this project didn’t have student involvement (aka cheap labor) that helped justify rolling their own.
* A company is legally required to do time tracking. They usually have a shitty excel sheet to fill out (and every fills in the defaults), or at best a single "check in"/"check out" button that someone coded 10 years ago and still works.
* A company does time tracking to bill 7 different customers for the 12 different tickets each engineer is assigned. The software used to track this was made by 30 full-time engineers and requires a 200-page manual to administer. New employees have to take a 2h course to understand how to fill in their time sheet.
How to book vacation time is extra.
On the bright side, Bloomington has other hidden gems (for now) that elicited similar feelings.