How do I set a monthly buget?

Karen, the problem with this is that my budget is 40 hours PER MONTH. The option you describe doesn’t take into account that my budgets are monthly.

I think you’ll have to work around this, but creating one project for every month.

Would be great feature to allow monthly budgets considering how many people that track time also have monthly budgets for that time. Thanks for your help.

I’d also love this feature! I end up editing the project budget each month, adding the extra amount each month, but it’s a real mess….

Recurring Projects

We have clients on website support agreements – whereby they might, for example, have 3 hours per month.

Currently we are setting up one annual job for X; lets say 3 hours per month example = 36 hours per annum

We then set a notification as a percentage of this (i.e. 8.13% in month one) BUT have to remember to do this each month!

A recurring project with X number of hours per month would make it real easy to manage and also invoice any time in addition.

Of course if anyone has a better workflow to get round this I am all ears!

I’m also adding hours to each project at the beginning of the month. Since hours don’t roll over month-to-month I have to set the project budget to total hours used prior to this month + budgeted hours for this month. Remembering to do it is the trickiest part. It’s not much fun to go back and calculate your budget after you’ve already worked through the first week of a month.

I have the same issue. It’s quite common to have this sort of arrangement on a contract. For me I track my hours by creating a detailed report of uninvoiced billable hours for the project (which I invoice every month) then times by my rate. The budget feature is nice, but making a monthly option would save a lot of hassle. Is it likely to happen do you think Karen?

+1 for notification please. While this is low on MY priority list, it’s on my list, nonetheless :) For the time being I’ve just been ignoring monthly budgets in Harvest and tracking them externally because a significant number of my clients have monthly budgets allotted for x number of hours and creating a new project for each of them every month is far more work than I am willing to do.

+1 we would really love monthly budget feature as a part of a budget total within harvest.

1 Here – we have 100 clients each with several recurring monthly budgets, creating new project monthly or adding hours is not an option. This is a top priority for us. Without it, we have to wait until the month is over to catch any issues and that leaves us as reactive, which is VERY bad.

Would really us as well, we’re able to track fixed hour projects easily, but monthly retainers we do outside of harvest.

Please add us to the growing list of users who really need this. We sell monthly maintenance agreements where we provide clients with a set number of billable hours for that agreement per month.

We also allow them to “bank” hours up to a limit after which they expire (i.e. if an agreement provides 10 hours per month they can bank up to 60 hours) and we can allow them to borrow future month’s hours as long as they are on a signed agreement (i.e. if we work 25 hours on an 10/hour per month agreement we’ll use 10 this month, take 10 from next month and bill them for 5 hours over.) For this to be really useful it would be nice to be able to configure how much they can bank and how much they can borrow.

And my guess is that what I describe above would likely be similar to others needs who offer maintenance agreements? Plus, having the ability to enter and manage these would make the relative high cost of Harvest compared to other SaaS we need to run our businesses less distracting.

+1 for me please, we have the same situation as @mikeschinkel above, as I am sure a lot of companies offering support / maintenance contracts do. Thanks

I would like project budget per month as well, can I be on the list?

We had the same problem as most of our clients want monthly budgets. So we wrote our own little helper script. It uses the Harvest API to automatically rotate projects with budgets that end with the current month such as this: “Website maintenance 2011-10”.

We run it using cron on the first of every month and it takes all these projects, archives them and creates new projects with the same members and tasks but a new month in the title.

That solved the problem for us. The script is pretty bare-bones but it’s here if you’d like to take a look: https://gist.github.com/1330207

Hope it helps someone.

Hello,
We offer consulting services based on monthly hours. So, having a monthly budget is critical to our reporting. Please add another request to the “to do list” review process.
Thank you!

I would also like to say this is one of the most important updates needed for us as well.

+1 for monthly hour budgets. Need it!! :)

+1 for this one

Hi! We still really want this feature! Since I asked for this in 2010, can I get another +1 please? Is your upcoming feature list visible to customer so that we can vote other issues up or down?

+1
This feature is important for us too.
ALL of our contracts are for monthly / weekly limits at a specified rate.

@jonasvp (https://gist.github.com/1330207) looks like a good stop gap solution!