Hours, budget & margin alerts

Find out in week two, not at month end.

Timesheets tell you what happened. Handl tells you while it's happening... who's over, which project is burning its hours, and where the margin just went.

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Free for 7 days, then flat plans from $29/mo.

Defaults

Every project self-arms.

You don’t set anything up. The moment a project exists, three alerts are already on it: hours over allocation, a milestone deadline approaching, and budget 80% consumed the moment there’s a budget to measure against.

That’s the difference between a tool you have to remember to check and one that taps you on the shoulder. Most agencies never get past the “we should really set that up” stage. Here there’s nothing to set up.

Add your own on top... a weekly limit for the one person who never says they’re drowning, a cost ceiling on the fixed-fee job, a margin floor on the retainer. Or don’t. The defaults are already watching.

The Project Alerts panel on a Handl project listing four alerts: a per-person weekly limit of 32 hours with its trigger history open, budget 80% consumed, over allocated hours at 100%, and a milestone deadline 3 days out, each with email, in-app and Slack toggles

What it watches

Twelve things it watches.

Pick an alert type, set the threshold in hours, dollars, percent or days, choose a day, a week, a month or the whole project, and point it at one person or the whole team. That’s the entire form.

People

  • A person over their hours for the week
  • A person over their hours on the project
  • A person logging fewer hours than expected in a week
  • A person over the hours allocated to them on a milestone

Projects

  • Total project hours past a threshold
  • At the current pace the project will run over its budget
  • No time logged for a set number of days
  • A milestone deadline approaching

Money

  • A percentage of the budget consumed
  • A dollar amount of the budget consumed
  • Project cost past an amount
  • Margin below your target
Handl's Create Alert dialog: alert type Budget % Consumed, a threshold of 80 percent, an optional alert name, and in-app, email and Slack notification toggles
Handl's in-app notifications list with three alert notifications: hours over plan for a team member past a 32-hour weekly limit, a budget heads-up at 80% of a 260-hour budget, and a milestone coming up in 3 days

Delivery

Where the ping lands.

Each alert has three switches: email, in the app, Slack. Flip the ones you want. The Slack one goes to the channel you choose, so the PM sees the project alert and you see the margin one.

Every trigger is logged against the alert, with the value it fired at and when, so “how long has this been going on?” has an answer. And it doesn’t nag: an alert fires when the line is crossed, not every hour after.

The hours themselves come from wherever your team already logs them. Harvest, Toggl, Hubstaff or Clockify, synced in. Nobody learns a new timer.

Reports

The reports behind it.

Alerts are the interrupt. The reports are where you go when you want the whole picture. Utilisation per person: hours logged against capacity, billable share, and what those hours earned and cost. Budget burndown per project: how fast the hours are going and where the line hits the budget.

The team-member report puts cost and billable hours side by side for everyone, so the “who’s over” question and the “who’s idle” question get answered on the same screen.

Want the spreadsheet version first? The free capacity planner does the 12-week grid by hand.

Handl's Team Utilization report for this week: four people with hours logged, billable percentage, utilisation against capacity from 65% to 80%, and the summary line '4 people logged 116.5h this period, team utilization 71%'

Permissions

Juniors can log time without seeing rates.

Cost is a permission, not a default. Give it to the people who run the numbers. Everyone else sees hours and never a rate, a cost or a margin, on the project page or in any report. So the whole team can live in the same projects without the whole team knowing what everyone earns.

Frequently asked questions

Does it stop people logging time when they hit the limit?

No. It warns you. The work still gets logged, the hours still count, and nobody's timesheet bounces. Allocations and included hours are advisory, so the alert is the whole point... you find out and decide what to do.

Do I need Handl's own time tracking?

No. Handl doesn't have its own timer. Connect Harvest, Toggl, Hubstaff or Clockify and the hours flow in from where your team already logs them.

Can I get a daily summary instead of individual alerts?

Not yet. Each alert arrives on its own, by whichever channels you tick... email, the app, Slack. Turn off the ones you don't want to hear from and keep the ones you do.

What if I don't set a budget?

You still get the allocation and milestone-deadline alerts on every project. The budget 80% alert only arms itself when there's a budget to measure against.

Can my team see rates and margin?

Only if you give them cost permission. Everyone else sees hours and never sees a rate, a cost or a margin figure, on the project or in the reports.

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Week two, not month end

Stop finding out from the timesheet.

Connect the time tracker you already use, and every project starts watching itself. 7-day free trial, from $29/mo.

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