Letting go of clients is a painful decision. You become invested in their business and want them to succeed. But sometimes the economics of a client relationship just don’t work out.

At the end of the day, every business needs to turn a profit. If you discover you’re losing money on a client, it may be time to part ways. But how do you figure this out? Your intuition might be telling you a client isn’t working out, but you need data to be 100 percent sure.

This is the position Shareef Defrawi, president and founder of Bonafide, a Houston-based digital marketing agency, found himself in when he decided to take his business in a new direction. Bonafide began life as an SEO agency, but as the digital space evolved, Shareef realized he could better serve his clients by embracing a more holistic marketing strategy. This new approach drove considerably more value—but at a higher price. Continue reading…

Many of our customers depend on the Harvest Project Status reports to keep track of project progress, making sure that hours and costs are within budget. Today we’re excited to announce an improvement that will make the Project Status report even more useful: track project budget by project total costs.

To use this new feature, go to Manage > Projects, click on any of your billable projects. Under the Budget section, choose the option, Total project costs, and you will see a field for you to put in the estimated project costs. You’ll also notice a checkbox below for you to include project expenses or not – depending on your selection, Harvest will (or will not) include the expenses your team have accrued for the project as part of the total project costs. Make sure that you choose a billable option and put in an hourly rate. Harvest will then show you, visually, on the Project Status report, how your project is doing compared to the estimated costs.

Another small improvement to the project settings page: you can now put in a single project hourly rate. And of course, Harvest will take that hourly rate and calculate the costs on project reports, and will automatically fill in all the info on your invoices.

We hope you find these new improvements useful, and thank you for supporting Harvest! Please let us know if you have any questions, feedback or suggestions.