Billables Buddy

April 2022

Billables Buddy

April 2022

Billables Buddy was created out of a simple necessity: to help monitor your progress towards billable expectations when using Forecast for scheduling and Harvest for time tracking. It accomplishes this by leveraging data provided by public APIs from both platforms. It calculates billable expectations based on the user's starting time and the hours they've billed. Throughout the day, the status and estimated end-of-day progress are automatically recalculated based on real-time progress towards billable expectations set in Forecast. Breakdowns include expected and actual hours by type (billable and non-billable) and by individual project.

A single easy-to-understand emoji conveys the current status based on the current date and time, as well as the user's current start time. On-track (✅) indicates that users are meeting, ahead of, or within fifteen minutes of current billable expectations. Behind (❌) indicates that users are at least 15 minutes behind the current billable expectations. Over (🛑) indicates users have exceeded the total billable hours for the week.

Billables Buddy, an open-source project written entirely in Go, is compiled to a single executable binary for quick and lightweight recalculations.