Tracking hours for flat fee project

I second Jordan’s request, so thanks Danny for your comment.

Cheers
Jayne

Has fixed fee billing been implemented yet? I just setup a new account this evening. I’m a CPA and I bill my clients on a fixed fee basis. I still need to know how much billable time and amounts I put into the job though.

I’d love more support for this. For now, I came up with a per hour value and a base amount of hours for each billing period. If I don’t actually put in those hours, I add a make up charge. If I put in more hours, I add a negative value labeled as a flat rate discount, There’s a bit of math, but it has been helping to keep my client happy, who has been ripped off by paying flat rates in the past.

I just signed up for the trial and although I’m willing to forge ahead I think this might be a deal-breaker. :(

I’m also disappointed by the fact that almost a year ago Danny Wen said “We’re going to have better support for fixed fee billing situations in general, so stay tuned for some updates on that front.” and now you’re telling folks it’s not even in the “timeline”.

Count me as a +1 (assuming you are incrementing the Kaizen feature request counter for each post above as mentioned in http://www.getharvest.com/blog/2011/02/how-we-h...).

Thanks,
Josh

(+1) for me, too.

Yeah…unfortunate.

Hi, I think I have a similar issue in that I charge on a per project basis but in advance of the project starting. So for ‘Project 1’ I will charge £X amount for X number of hours. Ideally there’d be a ‘generate invoice’ button against the required project… however how do I set up my project so that my invoice generates showing the project name, with the project value? (rather than counting the hours and giving a total).
I still need to be able to report against how many hours I’ve spent on the project & tasks(and be notified if I get close to budget). Thanks

This is going to be a deal breaker for me too! Most of our projects are fixed price and without being to account for this in the system there is not much point using it sadly.

It is such a good system except for the lack of that one feature.

Richard

My suggestion is to put something like “Fixed Cost” in the project name or code. This will give you a good visual indication that the project is fixed cost, so that when you invoice, you can look at the project notes and see what you agreed to bill for the fixed cost milestones. If you want, you revise the hourly bill rate for the project, based on the actual time spent (but, the danger with this is that it changes your revenue generated on an accrual basis, retroactively). The right way to do fixed cost projects IMO is to track some sort of % complete metric and the fixed cost value of the project. I can’t wait until Harvest can do that for me.

@Samara – What are your suggestions for handling a fixed fee project with Harvest?

+1 fro me too on fixed fee projects and being able to manage hours

Hi Samara, please add another +1 for me too.

+1 :)

+ 1 for us too. We always charge exactly what we estimate, but still enjoy knowing how many actual hours have been spent on the project by using timesheeting. I simply ignore the billed and uninvoiced sections on the reports, it’s of no use to us when we create invoices from estimates and not from projects.

+1 for us.

We usually charge flat rate for large jobs, but obviously want to track hours to make sure we don’t start losing profit by investing too many hours. But other times we charge hourly for regular clients who will give us several projects a day.

I’m afraid this could really be a deal breaker, there needs to be support for fixed fee invoicing.

Perhaps have a look at what cronsync are doing? they have some great support for that – if you have a fixed fee budget, they even have a graph that shows you hours/expenses/budget/profit throughout the life of the project. But their site is a bit slow to load all the pretty graphs, and I would much prefer to use Harvest, It’s just the fidlyness of correcting all quantities to 1 and changing all values to the fixed fee amount. It’s just too much extra time to invest.

Regards,

Ben

The Drop Studio

We have just started using Harvest and overall it’s great. Typically for projects we offer a fixed price quote as well and Harvest is ideal for tracking project time (and overruns). What we are doing is manually entering the invoices as per our agreed quotes. Then I run the ‘Detailed Report’ under ‘Uninvoiced’ for the project and simply mark the project hours as invoiced.. As far as I can see it has no further impact on our budget reporting..

I apologize for my last comment.. On futher investigation I now see that Harvest makes the assumption that we invoice for every minute tracked. This gives an incorrect $$ figure against the client/projects in the main ‘Reports’ screen..

It seems to me that what is needed is some form of integration between the project budget reports (where a budget has been set against a project) and the main report screen to show actual hours as a $ value against the budgeted time..

+1 for me please, I am very new to Harvest and am loving it but I like to track jobs using billiable and we invoice by task hourly rate However when it comes to invoicing I invoice by the total project fees (whether we used more or less then quoted) So I can create freeform invoices which is fine but this leaves the report for uninvoiced pretty redundant when actually this could be a really powerful tool for making sure I have invoiced everything.

I hope this is a valid request and I am not just missing something really obvious…because I am a Harvest newbie. Thanks :-) This is my first forum post! Woot

+1

Nearly all our projects are fixed fee, and I’ve been scratching my head for awhile on how better to utilize the budget tracking in Harvest for these projects. Glad to know I wasn’t missing something obvious.

here in england where the economy is rocky we’ve gone from 85% retainers to 85% fixed fee projects. harvest, you need to fix this asap, pls.

hello! we are harvest customers for some time now, and the biggest problem with it i the fact, that there is no way to track flat fees for a project… like thefirst poster said.. “I’m probably missing something simple here…
If I quote a flat fee for a project, I still like to keep track of my hours in Harvest (so I can later assess how accurate my flat fee was). When it’s done, I create an invoice, put in the flat fee, send, eventually receive payment. Harvest, however, still thinks those are uninvoiced billable hours. Does anyone have a good system for this?”,,

many times this feature has been promised.. so please: when will this be done? it can’t be that hard and is more important than any button-redesign..

waiting for an honest answer.. otherwise harvest is great and if the flat fee options are included i will recommend it to a lot of people out there..

thanks for your answer.

@Jon thanks for your help

Please add me to the list, this is a very important feature.

+1. We have a company of about 80 employees, all tracking our hours in Harvest, and also use the reports for seeing if we’re in total on budget financially as a company. About 1/3 of our client projects are flat fee, and this is a bit of a never ending problem for us, the work arounds take a lot of time. I’d LOVE to see this implemented, since Harvest is apart from that an excellent tool that I love to recommnend to friends, clients and colleagues.

+1 from me also. We charge flat fees but want to see how close we are…

+1) Very NB!!! to get fixed ASAP…Should be close to the top of Dev Team’s list in my opinion – All the great time tracking features that exist in Harvest are totally diluted when it comes to understanding clearly the $$ impact of what has happened after invoicing a flat fee project.

+1 same issue here. Just testing Harvest for our consulting firm and flat fee with time tracking is pretty key! Its the only real issue I’ve found so far.

+1 This is a concern to us as well.
Most of our projects are offered on a fixed fee and we would like to know if this is a feature that will be added to Harvest within the neares future.

I was intending to bring on several clients. But this issue is a deal-breaker for sure. It’s a shame. Harvest could be such an awesome product, if only….

+1 for us!

We quote and bill (almost) everything on a flat-fee basis. I then want to track hours by task, so I can see where time is being spent and if we quoted the project properly. If there was a way to select Billable>Do Not Apply Hourly Rate and then enter the billable amount (i.e., the quoted flat fee), then the Reports could reflect how much we’re making per hour/per task/etc.

It would also be nice to be able to go into Reports>Uninvoiced and create invoices based on the flat-fee quoted (which you would enter when creating the project) rather than having to go back and cross-reference notes to create a free-form invoice.

Thanks!

+1 for us as well. Thanks for the consideration.

+1 80% of our projects are flat rate billed! We want to track how profitable/efficient we’ve been on flat rate projects. cronsync seems to be doing this…much needed.

+1 on fixed fee projects