
Ask HN: Leaking hours and money. I need a tool to keep digital projects in check - digitalengineer
I do a lot of online projects (one man show) with a lot of 3rd party&#x27;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&#x27;m constantly going overboard. I don&#x27;t mean a time-tracking thingy). I would <i>love</i> to find a good tool... Thanks in advance!
======
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.

------
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.

~~~
digitalengineer
Thanks a million!

------
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)_/¯

------
mbruschi
Have a look at getharvest.com

~~~
digitalengineer
Thanks. Either Getharvest or Planscope. Both are looking good.

------
throweway
+1 for the spreadsheet

