Digital agency software that replaces five SaaS tools with one chat

Stop bouncing between Asana, Harvest, Slack and Notion to answer one client question. Ask hice.ai and get the project, the burn, and the next deliverable in one reply.

Why Asana plus Monday plus Slack plus Harvest is killing your margin

Digital agencies and consultancies live on retainers and sprints, but tooling sprawl means project leads spend half their day context-switching. Meanwhile creative teams refuse to log hours because the timesheet tool is a different login.

Account managers spend 2-3 hours a day in Slack threads that should have been a status update
Retainer hour balances are wrong by the time the client meeting happens
Sprint scope creep is invisible until the post-mortem
Freelancers' invoices arrive without a project tag — finance pieces it back together
Designers and developers hate timesheets, so 15-20% of billable hours quietly disappear

One front door for project, finance and team

hice.ai sits on your projects, hours and contracts so anyone can ask anything in plain English. The AI updates the right system underneath — no extra clicks for creatives, no missed billables for finance.

«How many retainer hours does Klarna have left this month?» → 32 hours of 80, with breakdown by senior dev / designer / PM
«Compute last week's overage to invoice on the Spotify sprint at our standard rate» → billable amount with hours, rates and matched PO, ready to export
«Who's free next sprint for a 2-week React engagement?» → ranked list with skills, availability and current burn

Try it in chat

Examples you can ask:

Static demo of hice's AI chat.

What you get

Retainer hour-bank tracking

Live balance per client, with overage alerts before you blow the contract — not after.

Sprint-aware time logging

Designers and devs log hours with a one-line chat command; AI maps it to the right sprint and project.

Freelancer marketplace integration

Onboard a freelancer with one chat command, set cost rate and bill rate, generate the contract — done in 5 minutes.

Creative project P&L

Margin per project visible in real time, including freelancer costs, software licences and overhead allocation.

Chat-first, no new app

Log time, request a freelancer, ask for project status — all from a simple chat command, no new app to learn.

Retainers and projects need different controls

Most digital agencies run monthly retainers alongside fixed-scope projects, and the two are governed by different numbers. A retainer is controlled by consumption against the contracted hour bank, with a counter both sides can see. A fixed-scope project is controlled by estimated remaining effort, which is not the same thing as hours already spent.

Putting both in the same view is the usual reason margin appears late and wrong. Keeping them apart costs nothing and changes the conversation with the client: on a retainer you are discussing whether the balance matches the value delivered, on a project you are discussing whether the finish date still holds.

Hour bank contracted, consumed and remaining, visible to the client
Remaining effort reviewed fortnightly on fixed-scope work
Roll-over and overflow rules written into the contract
Out-of-scope requests logged the day they arrive

Freelancers and subcontractors as a first-class cost

An agency that delivers with a mixed team of employees and freelancers has two cost rates on the same project, and often finds out the blended one only when the invoices arrive. The usual result is a project that looked profitable in the plan and settles ten points lower.

The fix is to attach the cost to the assignment rather than to the invoice: when a freelancer is booked onto a sprint, their rate, their project and their expected volume are recorded at that moment. Finance then reconciles rather than reconstructs, and the project P&L is right during the project instead of after it.

Cost rate recorded at booking, not at invoicing
Freelancer hours tagged to project and sprint from the start
Purchase commitment visible against the project budget
Blended margin recalculated as the team composition changes

Getting creative teams to log time without a fight

Designers and developers do not resist time tracking because they are undisciplined; they resist it because the categories describe a process they do not recognise and because nothing ever comes back to them from the data. Both are fixable, and neither requires a policy.

What works is fewer categories drawn from the work as it is actually organised — the sprint, the deliverable, the client — entry that takes seconds from wherever they already are, and a monthly moment where the team sees what their own hours produced. The compliance problem usually turns out to have been a design problem.

Categories that match the sprint and the deliverable
Entry in seconds, from the tool they already have open
Same-day nudge instead of a Friday reckoning
Each person able to see what their hours funded

Real case: 45-person digital studio in Berlin

Lukas runs a brand-and-product studio with 12 active retainers and 30 project-based engagements. Before hice.ai, his weekly leadership meeting took 90 minutes and answered three questions. After two months on hice.ai, the same meeting is 35 minutes, his team logs 22% more billable time (hours that used to be lost), and he caught a £40k scope creep on a flagship retainer in week three instead of month four.

hice.ai vs Asana + Harvest + Slack + Notion

Feature	hice.ai	Asana + Harvest + Slack + Notion
Number of tools team logs into	One chat, one login	Four to six, every day
Logging billable time	One chat message	Open Harvest, find project, fill form
Retainer hour balance	Ask in chat, live answer	Excel reconciled monthly
Project margin	Real-time, per project	Quarterly export, by then it's gone
Onboarding a freelancer	5 minutes from chat	30+ minutes across three tools
Cost	One subscription	Four to six, summing to 3-4x

FAQ

Can it integrate with our existing tools?+

Calendars and email connect directly inside hice.ai. Integrations with other tools (e.g. design and code tools) are available on request.

How do you handle retainer overflows and roll-overs?+

You set the rule per client: hard cap, soft overflow with billing, or roll-over to next month. hice.ai enforces and reports on it.

We use freelancers on every project. How does cost tracking work?+

Each freelancer has a cost rate and a bill rate. hice.ai computes margin per project in real time, with alerts when freelancer mix erodes margin.

What about creative deliverables — can the AI track design rounds?+

Yes. You define review cycles in the contract (e.g. 3 rounds included), and hice.ai flags when a client is consuming more rounds than agreed.

Does it handle multi-currency retainers for international clients?+

Yes. Each retainer can be priced in its own currency, with FX captured at contract date for clean margin reporting.

Will my designers actually use this, or refuse like with Harvest?+

Logging time is one chat message: 'logged 4h on Klarna landing'. Designers consistently report it's the first timesheet they don't hate.

How does it compare with Productive.io or Float?+

Productive is form-driven and a tool to learn. hice.ai is chat-driven — your team is productive day one because they already know how to type a chat message.