Staying under budget has never been easier

December 15, 2009

ClientSpot now makes it easier for you and your team to stay under budget, and make projects more profitable.

Set Project Budgets
You can now set budgets (in hours) for projects. As you track time against projects, the main project list now shows you the total time logged and the budget you set, along with a little graph that show project health - green for safely within budget, yellow when you’re approaching the limit, and red if you go over. You can also see percent complete and time remaining by hovering over the graph.

Set Task Budgets
You can also set budgets at the task level - this can especially useful when working with subcontractors who are just doing a few items for the project.

You can see task time totals and whether they are over budget from the main project screen (over budget tasks show their time in red).

You can also use the main Task List view (click View Task List from the Projects tab) to show budget information with totals across all tasks, or filter by person or client. Excel exports also now include the budget information from this view.

Track Time against Budgets
The Task Timer also supports task-level budgets by showing the total time logged for a selected task (in addition to time logged for the selected day), and time remaining for that task (if set).

 

Email integration and project dropboxes

November 23, 2009

ClientSpot now plays nicely with email.

Reply to comments by email
You can now reply to comment notification emails, and those replies will be added to the project. The only restrictions are that the reply has to be a plain text email (versus an HTML email). The system can also handle replies that have mixed content (combination of HTML and text), but only the text portion will be used.

Create new comments or tasks by email
You can also create new comments and tasks for a project using a special project dropbox. Administrators can get the project dropbox address from the Edit Project view.

To create a task, send an email with a subject starting with ‘@task’ followed by the task name. Your email message can include task notes. If you address the email to a valid person in your ClientSpot account, the system will try to assign the task to that person as well.

Both features currently require the sender’s address to be a valid ClientSpot user for your account.

 

Task tracking and email notification updates

November 02, 2009

We’ve rolled out a few small enhancements we think you’ll like:

Find out what’s new with improved notification emails
Email notifications for project and task updates now show exactly what’s changed.

Choose specific people to notify of comments and replies
You can now choose who you’d like to be notified of a new comment and any replies. This supplements the company-level defaults if you’ve got a few extra people to include.

Show which tasks are waiting for responses
You can now set a task status to “Waiting for response” to let team members know that you need input or questions answered.  New filtering options also let you look for flagged tasks.

Something else you’d like to see?  Let us know at our new feedback forum:

http://myclientspot.uservoice.com

 

Estimating fixed price projects: a quick how-to guide

October 31, 2009

Though many online creative and service professionals use a simple hourly rate as their preferred billing method, flat-fee project work is an increasingly popular approach.

But how can you effectively price a project without losing money, especially if you need to subcontract parts of it?

Tip 1: Limit fixed price projects to those you’ve done before.

One common mistake is to bid on a project that you have no previous experience with. You might have the skills to perform the work, but without a clear understanding of how much time it will really take, you’re at risk for losing money on the project.

Even if you’ll be doing all the work yourself (and thus not paying out more to subcontractors than you take in), there is still an opportunity cost to any project — for the same time spent, you might have earned more by choosing a different project.

So it’s important to limit your bids to work that you’re both familiar with, and have performed several times for clients (successfully).

Tip 2: Track Your Actual Time Spent Against Estimates

Once you’ve determined how long a project will take, and factored in your profit, you’re ready to quote a fixed bid. For example, if you create logos, a new logo design might require 6 hours of effort, including a discussion with the client, the initial drafts, and 2 minor modifications.

If you want to earn a minimum of $40/hour, you could price a logo at $240 to break even, or $300 for a solid profit.

However, if you don’t track actual time spent on a logo project, you won’t know if your project is actually profitable. A particularly difficult client might require an additional 6 hours of work on the logo, lowering your hourly take from $40/hour to $20/hour.

And if you used a subcontractor to design the logo at $30 per hour, suddenly you’ve lost money on the project.

Too many of those money-losing projects, and you’re out of business in a hurry.

So careful tracking of project or client profitability is a good way to see what sorts of projects have the best margins, as well as which clients are the most profitable for your business. Over time you’ll develop a feel for what sorts of projects to bid as flat rate versus hourly, and what types of clients you want to work with.

What works for you?

 

ClientSpot and FreshBooks - integrated project management and invoicing

September 30, 2009

We’ve recently released an integration with FreshBooks,the leading online invoicing software.

ClientSpot users can now create invoices directly from time reports — and then use FreshBooks to send them by email or regular mail, get paid directly online, and keep track of invoice payments.

Here’s a short video on how to use this feature.