How Acme Studios cut Friday-evening admin from 2 hours to 15 minutes

A 22-person brand agency stopped reconstructing the week on Friday and started invoicing on Monday.

The challenge

Acme Studios is a 22-person brand and identity agency in Berlin. Like most agencies, their week ended in a familiar ritual: a two-hour Friday-evening session where every project lead reconstructed their team's hours from Slack threads, Notion docs, and memory.

The result was timesheets that were always a little fictional. Invoices that under-billed. A founder, Priya, who couldn't tell if a new retainer was actually profitable until the quarter closed.

Why Huble

Priya had used Toggl, Harvest, and Hubstaff. The first two were honest but manual — and her team consistently abandoned them by week three. The third was automatic but invasive. After one team member mentioned "feeling watched", it never got rolled out.

Huble was the first tool that captured activity automatically without making her team feel surveilled. Screenshots were blurred. URL capture was opt-in per project. And the same hours that ran the timesheet ran the invoice.

We tried four other trackers. Huble is the first one the team didn't quietly stop using by week three.

— Priya M., COO

The result

Within a week, every member of the team had stopped logging time manually. Friday evenings shrank from two hours to fifteen minutes — and that fifteen minutes was confirmation, not reconstruction.

Most importantly: a single number drives the timesheet, the report, and the invoice. When Priya raises rates next year, she'll be able to justify them with a margin chart that took her thirty seconds to produce.

What's next

Acme is piloting Huble's capacity planning module across the design team in Q3, with the goal of saying yes to one additional retainer before year-end without adding headcount.