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Ask HN: Leaking hours and money. I need a tool to keep digital projects in check

15 points by digitalengineer ↗ HN
I do a lot of online projects (one man show) with a lot of 3rd party's, licenses and time spend in each project. Can any of you recommend a tool to keep track of the costs and hours? Something that allows me to see how many dollars are left? (I'm constantly going overboard. I don't mean a time-tracking thingy). I would love to find a good tool... Thanks in advance!

14 comments

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[dead] truedev
It seems like a very specific need. Maybe your best and easiest choice will be a well tailored spreadsheet.
digitalengineer
Thanks for the reply's. But sorry guys, spreadsheets is not an option. It gets to cluttered too fast. (I'm no spread sheet guru, I do UX and design work).
kleer001
> I do UX and design work

Seems like you should be able to whip up something for yourself then.

ianbarton
We use freshbooks for all of our project billing (we're a small focused dev shop). You can set project budgets, track expenses against a specific project, have them invoiced to the client (if passing along costs) and time tracked. It doesn't sound ideal in your circumstance, but we treat it as our book of record for project finances and works quite well.
digitalengineer
Thanks! I'll have a look. planscope.io was mentioned to me as well. Anyone use that? It's rather new.
ianbarton
I used planscope.io for a year or so but never got past the hump of actually using it for ongoing client projects (That's not to discredit the app though, it's definitely a solid tool). One part of it that I did love was sending clients itemized proposals that they could pick and choose items and see the costs change.

Planscope is way more of a project management tool than Freshbooks (as it's primarily invoicing), so it would be worth giving planscope a try for a project.

mbruschi
Have a look at getharvest.com
digitalengineer
Thanks. Either Getharvest or Planscope. Both are looking good.
detaro
For money flowing out, if your bank allows you to create "virtual" credit cards/sub-accounts you can use those to make it easier to track where your regular expenses go or at least to notice if something costs more than expected.
brudgers
1. GNUcash for a Quickbooks alternative.

2. Ledger for CLI badasses.

3. Org-mode because time series data is essentially lists with time stamps.

4. Paper and pencil, because if that doesn'twork, then the issue is not technology. It's habit. Personally, I'd go with paper and pencil to develop a workflow before fooling around with technology.

But, the problem with going over budget boils down to one of two things: poor estimates or buying the job.

Lastly, if you're billing hours internally against a fixed price externally, there's always going to be an impedance mismatch. I know that HN'ers love to promote fixed price, but if it doesn't work then don't use it: bill time and materials instead.

Good luck.

digitalengineer
Thanks. You're right of course. I use to do this at BigCo and we had people doing the calculations and negotiations for projects. And doing the planning. Apart from that I'm just to f*ing nice. Clients do love fixed price. But I am way too busy working my ass of for months now. I need to raise prices and want to use Planscope to see how.
akulbe
I'm not a designer, but I use Freshbooks for all my invoicing/time tracking/estimation stuff for my business. It's free for up to three clients, you pay a subscription after that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯