I have a long list of features to add to the app, things that Harvest and Forecast never did to help me plan and run the business. It’s worth noting that 100% of our payments are ACH so I did not have to do Stripe integration or other payment processor integration.

But we were finally able to model the notion of the “prime contractor” which is a part of our business. Sometimes we have both an end-client and an intermediary (prime contractor) for the same project, meaning different legal entities for the bill-to and ship-to entities. We had workarounds in Harvest and QuickBooks for this but now it’s directly modeled into our app and it saves us a lot of them.

Time tracking and invoicing are unavoidable complexity in a consulting business, particularly at scale when you’re spending lots of time dealing with edge cases like invoice reinsurance (driven by time card mistakes, changes to purchase order numbers, or the need to move time from one purchase order to another).

We’ll probably have some weeks where we need to spend 2-8 hours to maintain the Harvest/Forecast functionality. And other (most?) weeks where we spend no time. The real takeaway here is we finally have a tool that perfectly models our business, and saves days of person-effort every month. It will probably allow us to delay hiring incremental operations personnel. That alters the break even calculation significantly.