Solving our own pain points: How much budget do I have left on my project?
If you’re a digital agency/consultancy like us, with client projects, it’s likely you ask this question regularly! We sure have been.
There are many bad ways to solve the problem and not a lot of good ones. If you talk to the sales team of any project management tool or time tracking tool, they’ll say they can do it but in reality it’s a less than perfect option, especially if you’re trying to create a more decentralised way of organising.
The problem
We store deal and contact details in our CRM
The proposal / contract is in a file storage app
Invoices are in the financial tool
Project tasks in a project management tool
Time used in a time tracker tool
But how to see everything in one place?
Our tool stack:
CRM: Pipedrive
File storage: Google Drive and Notion
Finances: Xero
Projects: Asana and Notion
Time tracking: Toggl
Automation: Zapier and Pipedream
Low code web app: Knack
Context
It’s early days on this project but, after talking about it for over a year, we’ve finally solved the first part of this problem.
We’re Knack developers, so naturally the solution involved a custom Knack app. We’re also on a tight budget, so we stripped the problem right down to the bare minimum project budget needs. (Admittedly, after talking about all the things we COULD do)
We like Toggl. It’s easy to use, aesthetic, has a handy Chrome extension, allows complex tracking including tagging. However, managing project budgets isn’t really what it was designed for (we’ve also looked at Harvest, Everhour and Clockodo and they couldn’t do what we wanted either). If we want some flexibility on how we track internal and external rates, margins, materials, timelines etc the time tracker comes well short.
We’ve also looked at Project Works to solve this problem but it’s quite expensive, already setup in a particular way so we’d be paying for lot’s of features we don’t need right now, and spending a lot of time maintaining it, which would make it more complex and time expensive.
Xero does it’s core job well, sending client invoices. It doesn’t have a clue what we’ll be invoicing in 3 months time though (let alone next month!). And the project management functions are rather uninspiring.
The solution
What we really needed, was a central tool to pull in all our logged time and track it against people’s internal and external rates.
That’s where Knack comes in.
But not before we solved as many problems as we could, with off the shelf web apps. In our case, this meant implementing Notion and the Bullet Proof template. Now we have a place to store all the free form, key details about our projects so we don’t have to worry about getting that in to Knack (Knack just needs to store a link to the Notion project) or losing them in Google Drive.
We’ve setup Knack to show us all our projects and store some related information:
The project budget and time lines
Each persons rate on that project
Any internal costs and margins on the project
Every night Knack calls Toggl’s API via Pipedream and updates the current months data for all logged projects, for all team members. We can also trigger an automatic sync from Knack for any month, anytime we want.
Every project in Toggl that we want to sync with Knack, we add an ID to the end of it in square brackets (a really basic hack to save development time). Doesn’t matter what the project name is called, as long as the ID is there. We have some simple error handling to keep track of anything that doesn’t sync right.
Now, at a quick glance we can see how our project budget is tracking overall, by milestone (we use them more like buckets) and by date.
What’s great, is that it’s easy to plug in to another time tracking tool. It’s not crucial to be Toggl, so it allows for a BYO tool approach.
There’s plenty more features we’d love to add/integrate and for now this is solving our most painful problem.
