About 300 pull requests merged across 12 repos last week. Most of it is boring plumbing... but a few bits are worth talking about. Here's the week.
Handl: multi-currency reporting, done properly
Lots of Handl agencies work across currencies. Bill a US client in USD, pay a contractor in GBP, report in AUD. Pretty normal now.
Most tools handle that by converting everything at today's rate. Which is fine for a quick look... but it means a March invoice gets valued at September's rate, and your margin on a finished project quietly drifts with the exchange market.
The project Overview already worked this way from August. This week we took it everywhere else. Profitability, utilisation, aging, cash flow, project health, forecast, margins... every report in Handl now converts each time entry, cost and payment at the rate on the date it happened. That's the standard way to value a transaction in your books.
Every report also now labels whether its figures are native or converted, so you always know what you're looking at. And if a project doesn't have cost data yet, the margin shows "—" rather than a guess.
Also shipped in Handl this week:
- Dashboard is now "Today". Money in and money out for the next few weeks, upcoming payments, and a cash flow chart that shows your recurring commitments (rent, tools, payroll) as markers so you can see the tight weeks coming.
- QuickBooks sync is live. Invoices push across matching to the cent, tax only on taxable lines.
- Basecamp integration. Connect it, pick a time mode, and billable time flows through to invoices. Joins Linear, ClickUp, Toggl, Clockify and Harvest.
- Two-factor login, CSV exports on every list, and an activity trail on invoices showing who changed what.
→ See how it works: cash flow · integrations · invoice automation → Free: invoice aging and chase tracker — the spreadsheet version of what Handl does for you → Start a Handl trial
Mortar: one plan, and purchase orders
We killed the pricing tiers.
Mortar is now one plan, $59 per seat per month, with everything included. Mortar's own share of client payments is a flat 0.4% on top of Stripe's processing, whatever the payment method, and every rate is published. There's a 7-day trial (current pricing). Tiers made sense on a spreadsheet, but every sales conversation turned into "which one do I need?"... and the answer was always "the middle one, probably". So now there's one.
The big build was purchase orders. Select items, raise a PO to the supplier, track supplier payments against it, and see the project's real financials on the overview. There's a guard so you can't order the same item twice by accident, which designers told us happens more than you'd think.
Smaller things:
- Preview as client. Designers can see exactly what their client sees in the portal before they send the link.
- Pinterest pins without a product link now come in as inspiration items, at no cost to your import allowance.
- Schedule revisions now track every field (colour, application, SKU...) so you can see what changed between issues.
And behind the scenes we built Xero and QuickBooks sync for Mortar: invoices, payments both ways, and purchase orders as bills. It's going through the app store review process now. More on that when it's live.
→ Mortar pricing · procurement · client portal → Free: interior design budget template → Try Mortar free for 7 days
First Shift: Arbeo gets a home care brand
Arbeo is our ATS for small businesses that don't want the complexity. This week it got a second face: First Shift, for independent home care agencies in the US.
Same engine underneath. But home care hiring is its own world: credentials, licences, 18+ confirmations, and health screening that's only tracked after an offer is made. So First Shift comes with role templates, structured credentials and red-flag rules built for caregivers.
Most of the week, though, went on something less exciting and more important... a full privacy and fairness pass before launch.
When AI reads job applications, you have to be really careful. So:
- Candidates are told when AI is involved, and agencies can switch AI screening off per job
- Every prompt is told explicitly not to infer anything about protected attributes
- Recruiters can't search on protected-class terms at all
- The match score only looks at the must-haves the agency sets for the job
- Each agency sets its own data retention, and old candidate data gets purged automatically
We also cut the AI cost per application a lot: a smaller model where it's good enough, and rolling summaries instead of re-reading the whole conversation every turn. Unit economics matter when you're charging small agencies small money.
→ First Shift for home care agencies · how it works → Free: caregiver interview scorecard → Arbeo, the ATS without the complexity
Client work
Real Estate Jobs Australia — employers can now message matching candidates directly. The candidate stays anonymous until they reply or apply, so agencies can reach out and nobody's details get shared early. "Candidates found" now focuses on people local to the job, and closed jobs handle search engines more cleanly.
Columbus REALTORS® — the open-house listings page got a lot faster, thanks to smarter indexing and batched image loading.
Texas REALTORS® — first full week after launch (15 Sep). Sponsors now get banner performance reporting, with daily impressions and clicks charted in the admin. Site search got smarter too: members-only documents show up for visitors with a lock and no preview, and PDF results lead with the exact phrase you searched for. The course catalogue also stays in step with the EdConnect feed automatically now.
Abilene Association of REALTORS® — the property listings and map got a lot quicker, and every embedded widget now waits for cookie consent.
If you need something like this built for your industry, this is what we do.
Marketing, behind the scenes
The honest bit... not much marketing actually went out last week. It was mostly setup.
- Outbound email is warming up for Handl and Mortar. The sequences and the lead pipeline are this week's job.
- Mortar's directory kit is done. Screenshots at every size the directories want, captions and logos. Submissions start this week.
- Handl's ad tracking got rebuilt ahead of our first Meta test. It's consent-gated and server-side, and every lead records which ad angle brought it in.
- Mortar got a 5-question lead survey, and I get an email every time someone answers the nurture poll. Reading those is already more useful than most dashboards.
One thing I learned
Pricing tiers are a tax on the buyer's attention. Every Mortar demo had a five-minute detour into "which plan do I need?"... and that's five minutes not talking about their actual problem. One plan feels like leaving money on the table. We'll see. I'll report back on whether trial starts move.
See you next week.
— Daz
Consulting Inquiries
