SMF·TEAMWORK
Can a prompt replace Teamwork?
Project management — client work and billable hours
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
Teamwork is a project tool whose real subject is profitability: tasks carry logged hours, hours carry rates, and a project tells you whether it made money. That chain — estimate, log, rate, invoice, margin — is a week to build correctly, and correctly means the rate that applied on the day is the rate used, not today's. Nothing in it is a moat, so this is a kinda, with the gaps being mobile apps, integrations and the client portal.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build a project tracker for billable work, where the money is computed and auditable.
Stack: your choice, Postgres, Docker Compose.
Model: Client, Project, Task, TimeEntry, Rate, Invoice.
The rate model is where this build is won or lost. A Rate has a scope (person, role, project, or a specific person on a specific project), an amount, a cost amount, and an **effective-from date**. Resolving the rate for a time entry uses the most specific scope in force **on the date of the entry**, never the current date. Changing a rate today must not silently repriced last quarter's work. Write the test for this first: log an entry, change the rate, assert the entry's value is unchanged, and assert a new entry gets the new rate.
Time entries: date, duration, task, person, a billable flag, and a note. Entries are immutable once they appear on a sent invoice; editing one after that requires an explicit adjustment entry, which is what an audit trail means in practice.
Project economics on one page: hours estimated versus logged, per task and in total; revenue at the resolved billable rates; cost at the resolved cost rates; margin in money and percent; and a burn line showing logged hours against elapsed calendar time. Colour the projects that are over estimate and still open.
Invoicing: select unbilled billable entries within a date range, group by task or by person, produce an invoice with line items, and mark those entries billed with the invoice id. Generate a PDF. Do not build payment collection.
Also: task lists with dependencies and milestones, a per-person timesheet view with a weekly total, and CSV export of time entries with their resolved rates included.
Write tests for historical rate resolution across a rate change, for scope precedence when several rates could apply, and for the immutability of invoiced entries.
Do not build a client portal, mobile apps, or accounting integrations. Export a CSV your accountant can import and stop there.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 the mobile apps for logging time away from a desk
- B.2 the client-facing portal and its comment threads
- B.3 accounting integrations that push an invoice into Xero or QuickBooks
- B.4 resource scheduling and utilisation forecasting
- B.5 the desk and helpdesk products sold alongside
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: client-billing workflow
Because an agency that cannot see project margin is guessing, and stitching a tracker, a timesheet and an invoicing tool together produces exactly the seams that make the number untrustworthy.
Questions
Why is dated rate resolution the hard part?
Because the naive implementation joins to the current rate, and the first time you raise your prices every historical invoice quietly changes. It is a silent data-corruption bug: nothing errors, the numbers are simply wrong from then on.
What does "immutable once invoiced" buy me?
The ability to answer "why does this invoice say 12 hours when the timesheet says 11" a year later. An adjustment entry keeps both facts; an edit keeps neither.
Should cost rates really be in the same table?
Yes, with the same effective-from mechanics, because margin is the number this build exists for and a margin computed from a current cost rate against a historical billable rate is meaningless.
Does Teamwork export what I need?
Time entries, tasks and projects export as CSV, and the API covers the rest. The rate history is the part to check carefully — export it separately, because a time-entry export with only current rates will not reconcile against the invoices you already sent.
Related tools
Receipt