BlueHill is a unified customer operations platform that helps teams manage support tickets, automate client onboarding, track projects, and collaborate effectively. It's designed for SaaS companies, agencies, and professional services firms who want to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

BlueHill is built for customer success teams, support teams, agencies, SaaS companies, and professional services firms. Anyone who needs to manage customer relationships, handle support tickets, or streamline onboarding can benefit from BlueHill.

What features does BlueHill offer?

BlueHill offers customer support ticketing, client onboarding workflows, project management boards, a customer portal, team collaboration tools, analytics and reporting, workflow automation, email integration, a form builder, role-based permissions, API access, and webhooks for integrations.

Does BlueHill offer a free trial?

Yes, BlueHill offers a 14-day money-back guarantee with full access to all features. No credit card required to start your trial.

How much does BlueHill cost?

BlueHill offers multiple pricing tiers: a Starter plan at $29/user/month and a Professional plan at $79/user/month (billed annually). Enterprise pricing is available for larger teams with custom requirements.

Is BlueHill a professional services automation (PSA) tool?

BlueHill covers the operational layer of PSA — engagements, time tracking with billable categorization, client portal, internal collaboration, status reports — without the full enterprise PSA pricing of Kantata or Certinia. Firms that need resource scheduling at portfolio scale or complex multi-currency billing still need a dedicated PSA. Firms under 100 consultants typically find BlueHill sufficient.

How does billable time tracking work?

Time entries on tasks use time_estimate + time_unit fields and can be categorized as billable / non-billable / write-off. The auto-stopwatch starts when a task is opened. End-of-engagement reports roll up billable hours by consultant, by phase, by client — clean inputs for invoicing.

Can different stakeholders at the client see different things?

Yes. Each portal user (the client-side stakeholder) is scoped to their company. You can also configure which tasks and deliverables are portal-visible — so the legal team sees compliance milestones, while the technical team sees implementation milestones. The portal_assignee field can also stay stable even if you rotate consultants internally, so the client sees a consistent face.

How do we structure multi-phase engagements?

Engagement → Board → Task hierarchy. A 12-week engagement might be 3 phase-boards (Discovery, Design, Delivery) with milestones in each. The relative-date template makes the initial structure templatable — every new client gets the same starting plan with dates calibrated to their kickoff date.

What's the workflow for change orders / scope changes?

Change orders are a Form template — client signs off through the portal. The form submission lands as a FormSubmissions record linked to the engagement. Internal notes capture the partner's strategy on whether to absorb the scope creep or push back. Billable time on the scope-change tasks rolls into a separate line item for invoicing.

How do we keep internal strategy private from the client?

The internal-notes layer. Every interaction is typed (INTERNAL_NOTE vs EMAIL_OUTBOUND). Sensitive engagement strategy — 'the CFO is the blocker, work around them by going through Operations' — lives in internal notes and is filtered out of every portal query at the API layer. The client never sees it.

Can we run multiple practices (e.g., advisory + implementation) on the same instance?

Yes. Per-team scoping means an advisory pod sees advisory clients, an implementation pod sees implementation clients, and partners see across. Templates can be different per practice. Time tracking and billable categorization stay consistent.

Use case · Engagement managers + consulting partners

BlueHill for professional services firms

How consulting + professional-services firms run billable engagements on BlueHill — time tracking with billable categorization, multi-stakeholder portals, internal engagement strategy notes, retainer reconciliation.

The professional services job, in plain English

A consulting firm sells expertise applied to a client problem. The economic engine has four levers:

Utilization — what percent of your consultants' hours are billable.
Realization — what percent of billable hours actually get invoiced (vs written off).
Engagement health — are clients renewing / referring you / paying on time.
Internal coordination — partners + senior consultants + junior consultants working on the same engagement without stepping on each other.

A well-run firm pushes utilization up, realization up, engagement health up — and reduces coordination tax. The tooling that helps with this is heavy on the PSA side (Kantata, Certinia, Replicon) and expensive. BlueHill targets firms that have outgrown spreadsheets and PM tools but aren't ready for enterprise PSA pricing.

The engagement structure

Each client engagement on BlueHill is a Customer record. The work structure inside it:

Engagement-level board — the umbrella for the whole engagement
Phase boards — Discovery, Design, Delivery (or your firm's standard phases)
Tasks per phase — the actual deliverable-level work
Forms — for client data collection (intake, change orders, sign-offs)
Time entries — at the task level, with billable categorization
Internal notes — engagement strategy that stays private
Portal — what the client sees

The whole structure can be templated. A new client coming in on the firm's "standard advisory" engagement gets the same 3-phase, 12-week template with dates scheduled relative to their kickoff date.

Billable time, captured automatically

The time tracking on BlueHill is built into the workflow, not bolted on:

Auto-stopwatch — opens when a task is opened, runs in the background, prompts on close.
Manual entries — for offline work, calls, etc.
Billable categorization — billable / non-billable / write-off, per entry.
Time fields — time_estimate (what was planned), time_unit (hours or fraction), tracked deltas show estimate vs actual.

End-of-engagement reports answer:

Total billable hours by consultant
Realization rate (billed / total)
Estimate accuracy (how often we estimate well)
Engagement margin (billed - cost)

These flow cleanly into the invoice export — billable entries by client by period, ready for QuickBooks.

Multi-stakeholder portal — different views for different roles

A consulting engagement often has 4-6 stakeholders on the client side: an executive sponsor, a project lead, technical SMEs, legal/compliance, sometimes finance. They don't all need to see the same thing.

The customer portal supports per-portal-user scoping. You can:

Invite each stakeholder as a portal_user for the same Customer
Configure which tasks / forms / deliverables are visible to each (via tags or task-level visibility)
Keep the portal_assignee stable so they see a consistent main contact even as you rotate consultants internally

The executive sponsor sees milestones. The legal lead sees compliance documents. The technical lead sees the implementation tasks. No one sees what they shouldn't.

Internal-strategy layer — the partner's superpower

The internal-notes layer is where engagement strategy lives:

"The CFO is skeptical — we need a quick win by week 6"
"Champion is leaving the company; identify a new sponsor by Friday"
"Client is using us as leverage in a vendor negotiation; tighten scope"
"Junior consultant on the engagement: needs more partner oversight"

These never leave the team. The customer-facing layer (emails, portal updates, deliverables) stays professional. The internal layer stays candid. Two realities; one customer record.

Change orders without the email thread chaos

Scope changes are universal in professional services. The BlueHill pattern:

Partner / engagement manager identifies a scope change in an internal note.
A Form ("Scope Change Request") template is sent to the client via portal.
Client fills out and signs the form. FormSubmissions row lands linked to the engagement.
New tasks are spun up in the engagement with their own billable hours tracking.
End-of-period invoice has the change order as a separate line item.

Replaces a 14-email thread + a Word document + a spreadsheet reconciliation.

A representative week for an engagement manager

Monday standup (engagement team): open the engagement board. 4 active clients, 12 consultants across them. Review:

Utilization last week (target: 75%)
Tasks overdue
Client portal activity (any new questions / form submissions?)

Monday-Wednesday: client work. Tasks open, time auto-tracks. Internal notes capture decisions ("client wants to pivot to vendor X — partner to advise against in next meeting"). Two change orders go through the portal.

Thursday: weekly client check-ins. Most are short — the client portal has been showing live status, so the meeting is about strategy, not status. (Saves ~20 min per call.)

Friday: invoice prep. Open the billable-hours-by-client report. Reconcile against engagement budgets. Note any write-offs. Export to QuickBooks.

End of month: utilization + realization + engagement-margin review with partners. Numbers come from BlueHill, not a custom Excel.

Outcomes professional services firms report

After 90 days on BlueHill (averaged across firms switching from "Monday.com + Harvest + email + Word docs"):

Realization rate: 78% → 91% (less time falls through the cracks)
Utilization tracking accuracy: ~70% (spotty manual capture) → ~98%
Engagement margin visibility: monthly retrospective → real-time
Client status-update emails: -65%
Change-order cycle time: 9 days → 2 days

When BlueHill is right vs when you need a dedicated PSA

BlueHill works well when:

You're 5-100 consultants
Engagements are billable by the hour or by retainer block
You need a client portal + time tracking + internal collaboration in one tool
Your current setup is "PM tool + Harvest + email + Word"

You probably need a dedicated PSA when:

You're 100+ consultants with resource scheduling across portfolios
You bill in multiple currencies with complex tax rules
You run revenue recognition across multi-quarter engagements with explicit GAAP requirements
You need formal SOW management with legal-team workflow

Most firms cross that line around 100 consultants or $20M revenue. Below that, BlueHill is the simpler/cheaper/more-flexible answer.

Pricing for professional services

Most professional services firms land on Professional ($79/user/month) for the full feature set: billable time tracking, white-labeled portal, multi-stakeholder access, analytics. Enterprise tier kicks in around 50+ consultants for SSO and custom workflows.

See pricing · Read customer stories

What this replaces

Professional services firms arriving at BlueHill typically replace:

A project management tool (Monday, ClickUp, Asana, Smartsheet)
Harvest / Toggl / Clockify for time tracking
A separate client portal (SuiteDash, Plutio, ClientPortal)
Word docs + email threads for change orders
A shared spreadsheet for engagement-margin tracking

Sometimes a low-end PSA (Avaza, Productive) — BlueHill replaces that too for smaller firms, with a tighter customer-record model.