Studio Designer vs Harvest for Interior Designers: Which is Better for Time Tracking and Time Billing?

Efficient time tracking is crucial, regardless of your billing method. Even if you don’t bill clients directly for time, tracking hours helps you understand task durations, project costs, and employee efficiency. These insights allow you to make informed adjustments to improve project management and profitability. For instance, if an employee takes 20 hours to complete a task, and you pay that employee $100/hour (costing your business $2,000), but you’re only charging your client $1,500, you’re losing money on this task. On the next project, you can either staff a less expensive employee to complete the tasks or charge your client more for this work. To make these kinds of profit-boosting decisions, designers need the right tools to accurately track their time, bill appropriately, and generate reports to understand their firm’s costs and profits.

This article explores and compares the time tracking and billing capabilities of two platforms: Studio Designer and Harvest for interior designers. We’ll examine how these tools support designers and explore which may be the right fit for your business. 

Studio Designer vs. Harvest for Interior Designers: A Comparison 

1. Flexible time billing rates for your team based on their title and their task  

Why it matters:  

Employees at a design firm often charge rates based on their levels of experience and the tasks they are completing. 

For example, a junior designer may charge $150 for drafting and $50 for time spent in a client meeting, while a firm principal charges $300 an hour for drafting and $100 for a client meeting. 

Using a time tracking and billing platform that supports flexible rates ensures design firms can accurately account for these variations in billing, ensuring fair compensation for everyone’s work and accurate charges for clients. 

ALSO READ: 6 Reasons Why Time Tracking for Interior Designers is Essential — Even If You Don’t Charge Hourly!
 
Studio Designer vs Harvest for interior designers:  

Harvest offers only three options to set hourly rates on a project: you can set billable rate by project or by person or by task. Harvest’s setup does not allow for combining these on a single project. This means there isn’t an easy way for an employee to vary their rates based on their title and their tasks. Without software workarounds, you can’t have a project in which an employee charges $150 for drafting, $50 for a client meeting. 

Studio Designer offers a flexible Billable Rate Menu feature. In just a few clicks, you can customize time billing rates based on an employee’s title and task. Set as many tasks as each employee needs, and easily create new rates if your prices change.  

Overall:  
The interior design industry requires a flexible approach to billing for everyone in your firm’s time. Harvest’s billing platform is not really made for businesses that need to adjust time billing rates for each employee, based on their titles and tasks. Studio Designer’s Billable Rate Menu provides a single, centralized place to set rates for everyone in your firm, making it easy to consistently capture accurate fees. 

2. Customizable rates for your clients based on tenure and more  

Why it matters:  
Not all clients are charged the same price — a client you’ve been working with for a decade has likely been grandfathered into different pricing than your firm’s newest client. Many designers also offer discounted rates for friends, family, or colleagues. Flexible billing solutions are important to maintain these tailored billing rates, strengthen your relationships with clients of all tenues, and scale your business. 

Studio Designer vs. Harvest for interior designers:  
Harvest only allows you to bill by project, or by person, or by task, making it challenging to set specific rates for clients. 

For example, a designer’s rate may be $150 for drafting, and $50 for time spent in a meeting. However, for a long-term client, her rate may be $100 for drafting, and $25 for time spent in a meeting.   

In Studio Designer, it’s easy to manage and adjust client rates accurately and efficiently. Designers can use the Billable Rate Menu to set different rates for tasks by client. For example, designers can create a “New Clients” rate with the most up-to-date pricing for each employee, and a different “Friends and Family Rate” for those receiving discounts.  

This feature allows designers to maintain different pricing for different types of clients. You can increase your prices as you become more experienced and skilled, but you can still set more generous rates for your most loyal customers. This flexibility allows you to make more money as your business grows, while continuing to develop long-lasting relationships with clients.  

ALSO READ: 5 Reasons to Invest in a Project Management and Accounting System for Time Tracking

Overall: 
Studio Designer allows designers to have flexibility in their billing and maintain strong client relationships. This platform’s capability to customize client rates ensures that designers can adapt to the diverse needs of their clientele without complications. 

3. Ability to send invoices for time billing and products from a single system. 

Why it matters: 
When clients pay all their invoices — for your labor and for products — in the same system, it’s a simpler process for them and designers can get paid more quickly. And, automatically adding time billing to your invoices ensures designers don’t have to manually enter their time into another accounting system. This streamlines your work and minimizes errors made in manual entries. 

Studio Designer vs. Harvest for interior designers: 
 
Harvest allows designers to invoice directly from the platform with its QuickBooks integration. However, this means invoices may be spread across multiple systems – QuickBooks for time billing, and another project management system for products — making it challenging and cumbersome for designers to have a comprehensive view of their finances. For clients, it’s time-consuming and confusing to navigate multiple systems and make payments in multiple places. It also limits transparency for your client to understand how much they are paying for a project.    

Invoices are an important way designers represent their brand and level of professionalism to clients. Harvest’s invoices lack customization options so you cannot choose your fonts, layouts, and colors.  The invoices may also include details (like which employee is completing which task) that you may prefer not to share with your client. 

Studio Designer’s system offers time tracking, time billing features, and the ability to send invoices and proposals. With Studio Designer, clients can review and pay invoices for time and product in one, centralized place. This provides a seamless experience for clients, so they can pay easily, and designers can receive payments quickly. In one space, you can set rates for your work, track your time (both billable and non-billable hours!), and generate invoices for all billable hours.  

Studio Designer’s invoices are also fully customizable: you can match fonts, colors, and layouts with your brand image. And you can adjust the information displayed on invoices to enhance communication with your client — showing or hiding dates, employees, and task types. 

 

Overall:
Harvest for interior designers allows direct invoicing via QuickBooks but managing invoices for both your time and your products across multiple systems complicates financial transparency and is inconvenient for your client. And, with limited customization options for invoices, you can’t tailor these important documents to truly represent your brand.  

Studio Designer consolidates time billing, time tracking, invoicing, and proposals into one system. Clients can review and pay for both products and labor in one centralized place, so they can easily understand the cost of all parts of the project and can promptly pay designers.  

4. Reporting to assess team productivity and project profitability 

Why it matters: 
Comprehensive reporting is crucial for designers to analyze project profitability and assess business performance effectively. Reports that incorporate time billing allow insights into both individual and team time allocation, while integrating time billing with product sales offers valuable insights into project profitability and the direct impact of time spent on profitability. 

Studio Designer vs. Harvest for interior designers: 
 
Both platforms offer reporting capabilities to help you understand how your time is spent. These reports can also help answer crucial questions about your team’s profitability, including:

• How are your teammates spending their time? Are there bottlenecks that need to be addressed?
• Are there specific types of tasks or activities that consistently consume more time than initially estimated?
• Do certain clients or projects require more administrative or non-billable hours compared to others?
• Are you making money on specific tasks, considering profitability and your employees’ wages?

However, Studio Designer offers advanced reporting tools that integrate labor and goods. With all project facets managed on Studio Designer’s platform — from gathering inspiration to product procurement and delivery tracking — designers can quickly find answers to crucial questions about profitability, like: 

• Do certain project types or clients require more time but result in lower product sales, or vice versa? 
• Are there specific stages or tasks within projects that consistently require more time relative to the revenue generated from product sales? 
• Which projects are the most profitable based on both time and product sales?
  

Overall:
Harvest for interior designers offers reporting capabilities that allow you to understand how your team is spending time and the profitability of your time for one project. However, Studio Designer’s robust reporting tools make it the ideal choice for designers seeking to understand project profitability. In-depth reports give you insights into your team’s workflow and allow you to compare time and product. These detailed reports can give you a full view of your projects and answer important questions that help you understand your profitability, take on the right projects, and staff your team effectively.

5. Tools to support flat fee billing  

Why they matter:  
Flat fees mean designers charge a single, agreed-upon amount for their services rather than billing by hours or activities. Some designers prefer this approach, so any time billing and tracking software for the design industry should offer ways to track and charge flat fees. However, it is also crucial that designers using flat fees also actively track their time to ensure their charges correspond with the time spent and to keep projects on track. 

Studio Designer vs. Harvest for interior designers:  
Both platforms offer tools for designers who use flat fees. In both Harvest and Studio Designer, design firms can easily define and manage flat fees and track time against the fee to maintain consistency. 

Studio Designer offers additional resources, including a calculator tool that helps determine the appropriate flat fee based on completed activities. 

Studio Designer’s robust reporting is also essential for designers using flat fees. For instance, a designer sets a flat fee, but upon reviewing her billable hours breakdown, realizes she is effectively earning a low wage. Adjusting the flat fee to reflect the actual time spent allows her to justify fee increases to new clients and clarify how her time is allocated. 

Overall:
Both services provide tools for designers using flat fees. However, Studio Designer stands out due to its designer-specific calculator tool and more robust reporting capabilities.

6. Time tracking connected to project management features  

Why it matters:

Tracking your time should not be an afterthought. However, designers complete many tasks in a day – between sourcing items, responding to emails, and completing design presentations, it’s easy to forget to track your time. When time tracking is consolidated into a single system alongside all your other digital tools, you can accurately record your time, even as you juggle tasks. And it eliminates the risk of errors that can easily occur when data is transferred between different platforms.  

Studio Designer vs. Harvest for interior designers

Harvest provides tools like a desktop-based timer and manual time entry to track hours spent on projects, ensuring accurate time recording. However, it does not offer any project management tools for interior designers. While it is possible to integrate with generic systems like Asana, Harvest may not work alongside your choice software.  

Studio Designer has similar time tracking tools to Harvest:  

Designers can use Time Entries to record the time they have spent on the projects and the tasks completed and easily invoice their clients.  

Studio Designer’s Time Clock is a digital timer that tracks the minutes and hours spent on a task. You can set up to five timers so you can move between projects and ensure all your time is recorded. And, when you’re done, a pre-populated Time Entry will be created, so you’re ready to invoice your client for your time.

Studio Designer sets itself apart from Harvest with its design-specific tools for every step of the process, including tools to:  

• Curate and share inspirations with clients using Design Tools  
• Procure items with Studio Capture  
• Facilitate seamless client communication through the Client Portal  
• Ensure cash flow stays steady with easy, one-click client payments from Studio Pay  
• Record and stock items using the platform’s robust Inventory Management  

With all these features under one digital roof, designers can keep their work streamlined and always accurately track their time as they move between projects.  

Overall:

Both Studio Designer and Harvest facilitate project hour tracking through digital timers and time entries. However, Studio Designer’s integrated project management and time tracking tools eliminate the need to switch between platforms, ensuring precise time recording. In contrast, Harvest requires additional systems for tasks like product sourcing and client communications, complicating accurate time tracking across different platforms.

Studio Designer vs Harvest for Interior Designers: Which Should I Choose? 

Overall, Studio Designer stands out as the leading choice for interior designers to track and bill for their time.  

Harvest serves a broader range of businesses and lacks specific features needed by interior designers for time tracking, or for other parts of the design business, like product sourcing or accounting.

Studio Designer offers specialized time tracking and billing solutions tailored for design firms. Studio Designer allows firms to set flexible rates based on experience levels, activity types, and client specifics. This ensures precise billing and fair compensation. Time billing is automatically inserted into customizable invoices, reducing errors and administrative burdens, while keeping client payments within a single system. The platforms advanced reporting tools provide detailed insights into project profitability and resource allocation, empowering designers to make informed decisions effectively.

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