Boreal Studios is a 62-person creative agency based in Montreal with a satellite team in Toronto, building brand systems for Canadian challenger brands. They produced beautiful work and made very little money on it, because their utilization data was spread across three tools that disagreed.
The problem
Designers logged time in Harvest. Project budgets lived in a Google Sheet maintained by the head of operations. Invoices were drafted from FreshBooks, where the bilingual French-English templates had been hacked together by a former intern. Reconciling the three was a manual job for the operations lead, who did it once a month, by which point the answer was historical, not actionable.
The agency operated on per-project fixed bids — typical for Canadian creative work — which meant utilization mattered more than billable hours. But nobody could tell, mid-project, when an account had tipped from healthy 75% utilization into over-service territory. By the time the post-mortem flagged it, two more weeks of unbilled work had been done.
We were over-servicing every account by 18%. We just couldn't see it in real time.
Why Tracket
Camille Tremblay-Dupont, Boreal's head of operations, evaluated four tools — Harvest paired with QuickBooks, Float, Productive, and Tracket. Tracket won on three things: bilingual EN/FR interface that didn't feel like a translation afterthought, GST/QST handling for Quebec-based work, and the fact that Books, Projects and CRM lived on the same record without a single integration to maintain.
The migration
Boreal moved Projects, Time, Books and CRM to Tracket in two weekends in October 2025. The crucial trick: every time entry now references a project, every project references a customer, every customer references a contract. That chain unlocks live margin. The QuickBooks Canadian books were imported via .QBB export and reconciled by their CPA over one Saturday.
The result
Utilization rose from 58% to 71% in two quarters — not by working people harder, but by allowing PMs to see in real time when an account was tipping into over-service. Project margin went from negative on 22% of accounts to negative on just 4%. The bilingual interface meant the Quebec team finally got a CRM where everything was in French, including error messages.
Utilization is up 22% and our PMs got their evenings back.
— CAMILLE TREMBLAY-DUPONT · HEAD OF OPS · BOREAL STUDIOS