ClarityDesk features
ClarityDesk is a business management platform for services firms and agencies. Every module below feeds the same profitability, utilization and forecasting numbers, so time entered on Monday shows up in margin, capacity and cash flow reports without re-keying.
Time tracking
ClarityDesk time tracking is a weekly timesheet where each person logs hours against clients, projects and categories, with an optional approval step before anything is invoiced.
- Weekly timesheet with one row per project, plus a floating timer for tracking in real time.
- Categories you define: billable, non-billable, internal, PTO and anything else your firm needs.
- Optional draft, submitted and approved workflow, with rejection reasons and bulk submit for the week.
- Entries lock once they are attached to an invoice, so billed hours cannot drift.
- PTO categories reduce available hours, so utilization stays accurate through holidays and leave.
Projects and billing models
A project in ClarityDesk is a piece of client work tied to one of four billing models: Retainer, Time & Materials, Fixed Fee or Internal.
- Retainer: a recurring monthly, quarterly or annual fee, with hours tracked against scope and extra hours billed at a premium rate.
- Time & Materials: hours billed at agreed rates per role or per person.
- Fixed Fee: an agreed total billed progressively by percentage of completion, with milestone billing and a true-up on the final invoice.
- Internal: non-billable work that still counts toward capacity.
- Budget tracking per model: fee versus hours delivered, estimate versus actual, and cumulative billing against completion.
Invoicing
The invoice queue lists every unbilled hour, fee and expense across all projects, so invoicing becomes a review step instead of a reconstruction exercise.
- Create invoices in bulk, by project or aggregated by client.
- Line items for labor, retainer fees, fixed-fee percentages, expenses with markup, discounts and custom items.
- Tax rates, payment terms, currency, notes and an optional appendix with the detailed hours.
- Threshold-based approval workflow before an invoice can be sent.
- PDF generation with your logo and bill-to details, email delivery with tracking, and payment and void tracking.
Expenses
Expenses are logged against projects, flagged as billable or reimbursable, and flow onto invoices with markup applied.
- Receipt upload with AI-powered OCR that extracts vendor, date, amount, tax and currency for review.
- Billable, reimbursable and taxable flags, so client-paid and company-absorbed costs are kept apart.
- Markup percentage per expense, with a firm-wide default.
- Multi-currency with automatic exchange rates and manual overrides.
- Recurring expense templates, bulk receipt upload, threshold-based approvals and general ledger coding rules.
Client and project profitability
Profitability reports show revenue, cost, margin and margin percentage per project, rolled up per client, month by month.
- Revenue follows the billing model: hours times bill rate for Time & Materials, the pro-rated fee for retainers, and percentage of completion for fixed fee.
- Cost is hours times a fully loaded cost rate, where the cost rate is wage times an overhead multiplier.
- Drill down from a client to its projects and from a project to individual line items.
- Budget report with actual versus forecast variance, remaining budget and burn rate.
- Client leads and project leads see the clients and projects they are responsible for.
Capacity planning and utilization
Utilization in ClarityDesk is billable hours divided by available hours, where available hours exclude PTO and statutory holidays.
- A utilization target for each person, compared with actuals every month.
- Warnings for anyone running above 90 percent for sustained periods.
- Time forecasting by person, project and month, entered manually or derived from actuals.
- The current month uses the higher of actual and forecast hours, so capacity never looks emptier than it is.
- See who is overloaded, who has availability, and plan allocation months ahead.
Financial statements and forecasting
Financials bring the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow into the same system as time and billing, so forecasts are built from the work actually being delivered.
- Statements built from manual entry, formulas across lines, or figures imported from QuickBooks Online or Xero.
- Month-by-month forecasts for revenue, labor cost, operating expenses and cash flow.
- Automatic variance analysis of actual against forecast.
- Revenue projections informed by project profitability, and labor cost from billable hours times cost rate times overhead.
- Manual overrides and historical actuals alongside the forecast for trend analysis.
Accounting integrations
ClarityDesk connects to QuickBooks Online and Xero through OAuth and keeps both systems in step without replacing your accounting system.
- Push invoices to your accounting system, creating customers automatically where needed, and push expenses as bills.
- Pull payment status back, so paid invoices update in ClarityDesk.
- Pull the profit and loss, balance sheet and chart of accounts for financial reporting and GL coding.
- Tax code mapping, including compound GST and VAT for Xero.
- Idempotent syncs with error tracking and retry, and every connection event logged.
Dashboard and reports
The dashboard is an at-a-glance view of firm performance through widgets that match each role, backed by a set of standard reports.
- Widgets for revenue, margin and utilization KPIs, team utilization, client and project profitability, the time approval queue and this week’s time.
- Time entry and time-by-period reports for every role.
- Project profitability, client profitability, team utilization and budget reports with date, client and status filters.
- Month-by-month breakdowns with drill-down to detail on every report.
Team, roles and permissions
Six roles control what each person can see and do: Owner, Admin, Client Lead, Project Lead, Staff and Viewer.
- Client leads and project leads see only the clients and projects assigned to them.
- Per-member overrides when a role default is not quite right.
- Wage type, wage rate and utilization target per person feed cost and capacity calculations.
- Email invites that create the account on acceptance.
Data import
Existing staff lists and time entries import in bulk from CSV, and receipts can be uploaded in bulk with automatic OCR.
- CSV import for staff and time entries, with progress tracking and row-level error reporting.
- Bulk receipt upload with asynchronous OCR and a needs-review flag for quality checks.
See it with your own numbers
Book a demo and we will walk through ClarityDesk using your billing models and team.