18 pull requests merged across 5 repos last week. After 117 the week before, that looks like a holiday... it wasn't.
The week before, we shipped project costs and retainer auto-pay in Handl. Both touch money. So this week was a deliberate second pass on costs, adding tax and currency, rather than piling new features on top.
Handl: costs, second pass
Project costs went out the week before. This week they got smarter about tax and currency.
Net or gross, your call. Lots of agencies claim back the GST or VAT on what they spend. For them, a $1,100 bill that includes $100 of tax really cost $1,000... and that's the number margin should use.
So there's a new agency setting: "We reclaim GST/VAT on costs". Turn it on, tick "Amount includes tax" on a cost, and Handl stores the tax split and uses the net figure in your budget and margin. It works on one-off, recurring and scheduled costs. Flip the setting and your existing costs re-base too, so you don't have to re-enter anything.
It's off by default. Nothing changes for anyone until they turn it on.
Margins in the project's currency. Budget and margin for a project now calculate in that project's own currency, with each bit of labour and each cost converted from whatever currency it was in. So a project billed in USD shows its budget and margin in USD, even if your agency runs in AUD.
→ See how it works: cash flow · integrations → Free: invoice aging and chase tracker → Start a Handl trial
Client work
Real Estate Jobs Australia — second full week live, and the busiest codebase of the week. A few things worth calling out:
- Employers set up their branding at sign-up. During onboarding, employers can edit their brand colours and upload or replace their logo, so their job ads look right from day one.
- Better CRM filtering for the client. Contacts now sync to the client's CRM with a persona (business owner or candidate), and job seekers carry their suburb and state. Easier to segment, easier to follow up.
- More useful admin. The client's team can see each business's jobs broken down by status (active, draft, closed, archived) and update a business's logo and colours for them.
- Promo codes are easier to find. Employers are told exactly where to enter a promo or free-job code.
If you need something like this built for your industry, this is what we do.
Marketing, behind the scenes
- mortar.design got real screenshots. Our designer's product shots went into the ten placeholder slots across the site. Placeholders are fine for launch week... not for long after.
One thing I learned
New money settings ship switched off.
The tax setting this week is off until an agency turns it on. Auto-pay the week before was the same... nobody gets charged until the agency enables it for a specific client.
It'd be easy to flip them on for everyone. But if the margin on your project changes overnight, even for a good reason, the first thing you feel is "what just happened?". People need to choose the moment their numbers change. And anything that touches money gets a second, separate review before it goes out, even when that makes for a quiet week like this one.
See you next week.
— Daz
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