Consulting firms care about three numbers — utilization, margin, and capacity. Harvest gives you the first one (sort of) and the third one (as a separate $5/seat product). For margin, you're on your own. Tempough wires all three into a single workspace.
Mid-market consulting firms (5-50 consultants) sit in a specific awkward spot: bigger than the freelance-friendly tools, smaller than the BigTime / Replicon / Kantata audience that justifies a six-month implementation and a dedicated practice-ops admin. The firm-level numbers that matter are utilization (target 65-75% billable on a 40-hour week, varying by seniority), effective hourly rate (revenue per billable hour, including expected non-billable overhead), and forward capacity (who has bandwidth for the project starting next month). Harvest tracks billable hours but doesn't compute the second two because it has no concept of cost rates per consultant. Tempough's Margin report blends effective-dated cost rates (so partner reorganizations stay reproducible historically), OT-aware cost math, and forecast-vs-actual variance against per-person utilization targets — the three views a practice lead actually reviews in monthly partner meetings.
Not a generic critique — the specific places consulting firms typically run into the wall.
Harvest tracks billable revenue per project but has no concept of internal cost rate per consultant. You can't answer "did this engagement actually make money?" inside Harvest — you export to a spreadsheet and reconcile. For partnership-distributable calculations, that's a real operational tax.
A senior consultant's cost rate today is different from 18 months ago — Harvest can't express that. Tempough stores cost rates with effective dates, so a margin report for Q2 last year uses Q2 last year's rates. Important for quarterly partner draws and historic reproducibility.
Capacity planning is core to running a consulting firm — you're always asking whether the bench is right-sized. Harvest forces you to a second product (Harvest Forecast) at $5/seat/mo on top of Pro. Tempough's forecast is built into Team at $11/seat with forecast-vs-actual variance reports.
Same consultant on the same engagement at $250/hr for discovery and $200/hr for delivery — Harvest can't model that cleanly. Tempough's per-phase + per-member rate hierarchy resolves automatically when generating invoices.
The same surface, audience-tailored to what consulting firms actually need.
Per-project, per-client, per-consultant margin with OT-aware cost math. Snapshot frozen at timesheet approval so historic reports stay reproducible. The single most important number for a consulting firm, finally inside the tool.
Set 75% target for senior consultants, 85% for analysts. The Utilization report shows variance against target so you spot under- or over-utilization before quarter-end. Capacity respects time-off and holidays automatically.
Schedule consultants onto upcoming work, then see planned vs. logged at week's end. The variance number is what tells you whether your project estimates are systematically off — useful for sales pricing recalibration.
Project rate model can be uniform, per-task, per-member, or per-phase. Consultant + phase = lookup of the right rate at invoice generation. Audit-logged so you can prove which rate applied when.
Team gets you cost rates, margin, approvals, forecasting, and team reports. Team Pro adds branded invoices, webhooks/API for sync to a data warehouse, team groupings for practice-area splits, and document distribution (handbooks, IC agreements, policy ack workflow). Most firms over 8 consultants land on Team Pro.
Why teams leave Harvest, audience-agnostic.
Audience-specific tour of the feature surface.
Step-by-step walkthrough — most teams finish in under an hour.
Two-week trial. No credit card. Full feature set.