Project Time Tracking: A Harvest Alternative Saved Us $100K

In an agency, time tracking starts small. A timer, a project, a task, a note. Then the business grows, delivery moves faster, and the gaps start showing up in the numbers. A project runs hot before the budget picture is clear. A Jira ticket gets finished while the time entry comes later, disconnected from the work that explains it. Finance finds billable hours after the month has already closed. The team looks fully booked on paper, while leadership still has to ask how much of that capacity turned into revenue.

Optimum7 used Harvest for years, and the tool did what it was built to do: track hours. The strain came from the work around those hours. Delivery happened in Jira, finance needed uninvoiced work surfaced earlier, project managers needed budget pacing while projects were still active, and leadership needed utilization data tied to revenue-producing work. Optimum7 needed time data connected to the work, the budget, and the billing decisions it was supposed to explain.

Kronos was built around that need. The financial case started with the Harvest invoice, then became harder to ignore in the manual work surrounding every report, billing check, and budget review.

The $100,000 Case for Replacing Harvest

Harvest worked for years as Optimum7’s time tracking system. The monthly invoice showed one cost, while the work around the invoice kept adding its own. Reports had to be pulled, hours checked, billing questions chased, and project budgets reviewed after the work had already moved. The subscription gave Optimum7 the clearest starting point, but the larger cost lived in the cleanup Harvest left around it.

The subscription created the baseline. At $2,000 per month, Harvest cost $24,000 per year. Over 3 years, that number reached $72,000 before any internal cleanup was counted. Once the team looked beyond the invoice, the remaining impact came from the repeated work Kronos removed from the week: cleaner Jira-connected time entry, earlier visibility into uninvoiced hours, less report preparation, and budget checks while projects were still active.

The estimate breaks down into the direct Harvest cost and the operational work Kronos removed from the process.

The Operating Gaps That Shaped Kronos

Inside Optimum7, Harvest gave us the logged hours, while the working picture around those hours stayed scattered across delivery, finance, project management, and leadership. A time entry by itself did not tell finance what still needed to be invoiced, show a project manager how fast a budget was burning, or tell leadership whether a full calendar was producing revenue or absorbing capacity.

That gap kept showing up in the handoffs. Delivery worked in Jira, finance reviewed billing elsewhere, project managers checked budgets after the work had already moved, and leadership had to piece together utilization from reports that were never close enough to the work itself. By the time someone needed the full picture, the work had to be reconstructed from too many places.

Kronos was shaped around those scattered decisions. It needed to bring Jira activity, billing review, budget pacing, utilization, historical reporting, and project context into the same operating layer. Time tracking had to follow the work through the agency, from the ticket to the invoice to the budget view, without forcing the team to rebuild the story later.

Optimum7 built Kronos around solving 4 operating gaps where time tracking and agency workflows had pulled too far apart.

What Kronos Does Inside Optimum7

Kronos gives Optimum7 one time system with separate operational views for delivery, project management, finance, and leadership. The same entry that starts inside Jira can support budget pacing, billing review, uninvoiced hours follow-up, and utilization reporting without forcing each team to rebuild the data in its own place.

Capacity Visibility

Kronos separates activity from revenue-producing work. A team member can log 45 hours and still create a margin problem if only 18 of those hours are billable. Managers see each person’s logged hours against weekly capacity, with billable and non-billable time split in the same view. Overutilization, underutilization, and non-billable drag show up before they spread across projects.

Project Budgeting

Different clients price work differently, which means the time tracking system has to support multiple budget structures in parallel. Some projects are billed by the hour with time and materials pricing, while others are fixed-fee contracts where the total is set regardless of hours logged. Internal projects are non-billable, and retainer clients may have budgets that reset monthly or run for the entire project duration.

Kronos separates billable rates from internal cost rates, so managers can see the difference between what the client pays and what the work costs to deliver. Billable rate shows the client-side value of the hour. Cost rate shows the internal cost behind that hour, including salaries, overhead, and contractor fees. When both numbers sit in the same system, managers see what was billed alongside the real delivery cost behind the work.

Budget pacing in Kronos compares how much of the budget has been used against how far the project has actually moved. A project that has consumed 40% of its budget at 20% timeline completion needs attention immediately. Managers see that gap while there is still room to adjust scope, add budget, or change the delivery plan before the margin is gone.

Reporting and Billing Visibility

Kronos groups reporting around the questions agency teams ask every week: where did the time go, which projects are burning budget too fast, who has capacity, and what billable work still has not been invoiced? The reporting layer includes Time Summary, Detailed Time, Budget Pacing, Capacity/Utilization, and Uninvoiced Hours, with CSV exports when finance or management needs deeper analysis. Uninvoiced Hours is particularly important because billable work sitting in the system for weeks without being billed creates a cash flow gap even when the work is complete.

Time Entry Where Delivery Happens

Kronos supports live timers, manual entry, and weekly timesheet views, but the important part is where those entries connect. Each time record is tied to a project and task, marked billable or non-billable, and supported with notes. Once entries are approved or billed, they lock automatically so billing records do not change after review.

The Jira app made adoption easier because the team could log time from inside the ticket. Kronos recognizes the user, suggests the matching project, and lets the team enter common time increments without opening a separate system. The ticket number and title carry into the notes, keeping the time record attached to the work that created it.

Task-level tracking gives managers a cleaner view of where hours go. A project with high total hours and weak billable revenue needs more than a time total. Breaking the work down by task type shows whether margin is being lost through revisions, internal cleanup, inefficient handoffs, or work that was underpriced from the start.

The Technology Behind Kronos Stays Lightweight

Kronos runs as a modern web application built on Next.js, React, TypeScript, Vercel, Supabase, Prisma, Clerk, and Atlassian Forge. The application layer handles the interface and backend logic in one codebase. Vercel hosts and deploys the app, Supabase stores the application data in PostgreSQL, Prisma manages database access, and Clerk handles Google Sign-In for approved company domains. The Jira integration runs through Atlassian Forge, which keeps time entry connected to the ticket without adding a separate desktop tool or browser extension workflow.

The architecture keeps Kronos lightweight without making it shallow. There are no internal servers to maintain or patch, and the managed infrastructure handles scaling, backups, authentication, and database operations. At the same time, Optimum7 still controls the workflow layer: project setup, time entry, budget pacing, reporting, Harvest-style API compatibility, and Jira-connected time logging.

The same platform supports both Optimum7 and Zen Media, with organization-level separation built into the system. Users sign in with approved company accounts, permissions are enforced on the server, and staff from one organization cannot see the other organization’s projects, time entries, reports, or settings.

Why We Built Instead of Bought

Most companies should be careful before building their own internal software. A custom tool sounds attractive until the maintenance, adoption, security, and data migration work becomes heavier than the original problem. Building becomes dangerous when the tool solves one workflow problem but spreads into the operating layer, where updates risk breaking the business logic underneath. Kronos made sense for Optimum7 because time tracking had already moved beyond a simple SaaS renewal decision. It touched billing accuracy, project profitability, Jira delivery work, utilization, and years of operating history.

The historical data changed the decision. Harvest held years of clients, projects, tasks, users, time entries, billable rates, and cost rates. Losing that record would have weakened future scoping, removed context from client conversations, and made it harder to compare new work against similar projects from the past. Those records carried pricing memory, utilization patterns, and the margin history behind completed projects.

Kronos had to bring that history forward. Optimum7 built a purpose-built migration engine that brought Harvest history back to 2014 into Kronos. Each migrated record kept a reference to its original Harvest ID so the data could be cross-checked when needed. Existing integrations were protected through a Harvest-compatible API, which allowed tools and scripts that depended on Harvest to keep working with minimal change.

For Optimum7, the decision came down to workflow control. Kronos kept the work, the time entry, the budget, the invoice, and the historical record close enough for the system to answer the questions Harvest kept pushing back into manual cleanup.

That does not mean every agency should build its own time tracker. For most teams, buying is still the right decision. Building only starts to make sense when the workaround becomes part of the weekly cost.

Making the Rollout Familiar

Kronos did not roll out as a cold internal tool dropped into the team’s workflow. Before the official switch, Optimum7 shared the system internally, explained why Harvest was being replaced, and gave the team a role in the transition by letting everyone vote on the name. Kronos won the internal competition, which gave the new system a sense of familiarity before it became the daily time tracker.

The name was a small detail, but it helped the rollout feel less forced. The team had already seen the tool, discussed the change, voted on what to call it, and understood why the switch was happening before Harvest was fully replaced.

The first weeks after launch shaped the tool further. Team feedback surfaced small workflow friction, usability gaps, and practical time entry habits that only appear during daily use. Those early notes helped make Kronos more useful for the people logging time, reviewing hours, approving entries, and managing the work behind the numbers.

What We Learned From Rebuilding Time Tracking

By replacing Harvest with Kronos, Optimum7 gained a lower-cost time tracking system and a cleaner operating view of time, cost, billing, and capacity. The $100,000 impact came from the subscription cost Optimum7 removed and the manual work Kronos stopped from piling up around the old system.

Harvest showed the hours after they were logged. Kronos moved the data closer to the decisions those hours affected: project budgets, billing review, staffing, utilization, and margin. That changed the value of time tracking inside the agency. Kronos turned it into a live operating view instead of a record the team reviewed after the work was already done.

For agencies running into the same pattern, the warning sign goes beyond the SaaS invoice. Look at the cleanup forming around it. Billing questions surface late, project data gets pulled from another system, and capacity decisions happen without a clean view of billable utilization. Contact Optimum7 to see how we approach operational efficiency in agency workflows.

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About the author: Duran Inci is the CEO and Co-Founder of Optimum7, an eCommerce development and digital marketing agency specializing in platform migrations, custom functionality, and performance optimization for high-growth brands.

Duran Inci CEO of Optimum7

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