At our company, we manage sales tasks in HubSpot Tasks, and once a deal is closed, we move project management over to Tickets. For internal discussions, we add comments in the Ticket’s notes section.
We’ve also integrated the StopWatch for HubSpot plugin, which allows us to track the time spent on each task (basically acting as a timesheet). This time tracking data can already be used in reports.
My question is: do you have any ideas or best practices on how to plan for agency utilization rate/capacity, expense tracking, and budgeting in HubSpot? In other words, how do you approach client and project profitability analysis and forecasting within the system?
If there’s no way to achieve this directly in HubSpot, then we’ll probably have to rely on a 3rd-party tool, such as Allfred.io.
Hi @DNebojsa, I hope that you are well!
That’s a fantastic setup you’ve built with HubSpot Tasks, Tickets, and the StopWatch plugin for time tracking!
Great question, thanks for asking the HubSpot Community!
While a dedicated financial planning tool like Allfred.io might offer deep accounting features for very complex scenarios, HubSpot’s strength, particularly with the new Data Hub, lies in its ability to unify your customer, operational, and financial data (by integrating external sources) to give you a holistic, AI-ready view of your agency’s profitability and performance directly within your CRM.
This allows your teams to work from a single source of truth and make smarter, data-driven decisions for growth.
Here are some related articles that might be of interest:
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I’d love to put you in touch with our Top Experts and Community Members: Hi @ViniBernardo, @Oriol, @Shadab_Khan, @himanshurauthan, @PeterFrolund and @Lucila-Andimol do you have ideas or best practices to help @DNebojsa, please?
Have a wonderful day and thanks so much!
Bérangère
To ensure you get the most comprehensive advice, I’m tagging a couple of our Experts for their input as well: @danmoyle, @TomM2 and @Josh, do you have any additional suggestions or perspectives that might assist @DNebojsa?
Thank you all for contributing your insights, and have a wonderful day!
I’m excited to see how the project object tools expand within HubSpot in the future, as it might be the perfect solution. We have piloted usage of this for a smaller set of projects.
As of right now, we use TeamHood. It has been a great external PM tool for us as an agency and the team over there has been great about implementing feature requests. There are your standard PM tools, time tracking, and profitibility reporting built in. It’s worth checking out if you do decide to incorporate an external tool for the time being.
I can tell you from experience, tracking capacity in my different roles has been done outside of HubSpot. I’ve used (and currently use) Teamwork. I’ve also used Asana and ClickUp. But that means measuring things like budget and capacity outside of HubSpot, which isn’t always ideal if you want to report on it within a dashboard (although the ‘add external’ module is dope).
I’m optimistic that Projects will help with this as it evolves. It’s probably not there yet, but I think it’s on its way. It’ll probably require custom properties (including calculated properties to help show capacity) and custom reporting.
So this probably isn’t the most helpful answer, and that’s ok it’s not a solution. But I hope it at least shows you’re not alone in this!
The funny thing is that HubSpot works with agencies and knows that these are fundamentals that we can’t work without, but they haven’t created them within the CRM, so we have to use external tools.
Thank you for sharing your perspective, it’s a really important point.
Your feedback is invaluable, and I encourage you to share specific use cases and feature requests via the HubSpot Ideas forum, as it helps our product teams prioritize new developments.
In the meantime, if you or others have found effective ways to bridge these gaps with certain integrations or workflows, please feel free to share! This community thrives on shared solutions and best practices.
Thanks again for contributing to the conversation @DNebojsa, @danmoyle and @Josh!
Have a great day!
Bérangère
