One source of truth for time and scope

The situation

Snack is a boutique creative studio in Toronto, Ontario, with a team of eight and more than 25 years of work behind it. The studio spans branding and identity, print, infographics, environmental installations, digital and internal communications, for clients across pharmaceutical, finance, private education, transportation and the non-profit sector.

Before FunctionFox, almost none of that was being recorded in a usable form. Hours were written out by hand or reconstructed from memory at the end of the day, then handed to an accountant to tally manually. When a client added a task mid-project, the extra work often went unlogged, and therefore unbilled. Without accurate job records, invoicing became a negotiation rather than a statement, and a scope decision was difficult to defend. New work was priced on intuition, because there was no history to check against. And with several jobs live at once, nobody had a shared view of what was genuinely most urgent.

What changed

FunctionFox started as a fix for the paper timesheets and became the studio's operational backbone. The team logs hours against specific jobs through the day, or catches up in the evening, and automated reminders chase incomplete timesheets so nobody has to do it by hand.

Every task is logged against the original job brief, which turns added work into a documented record rather than a recollection. A custom job status list, Hot, Ongoing, and Coming Down the Pipe, puts the day's most urgent work on every team member's home screen.

The outcome

Scope changes are now documented as they happen, so they can be invoiced instead of absorbed. Estimating runs on evidence: the studio looks up past jobs of similar scope and prices new work from real history rather than gut feel.

Snack has been a FunctionFox customer for more than 20 years, growing into new features as the studio evolved without ever needing anything more complex. For a team of eight, that is the difference between competing on guesswork and competing on what they already know.