What I have done in the past is have a slack channel that everyone puts their status in once a day. No third party system required, and no need to setup chron!

I think automatic information distributio is the right idea. idonethis has an API so you can have a ticket completion automatically show up: http://blog.idonethis.com/connect-apps-to-idonethis-with-zap...

You could think of the manual information entry as forcing people to write things down that they are doing which they are not writing down in the ticketing/workflow system.