Every freelancer and small studio has lived this conversation: a project quietly slips from "on track" to "we're eating the overage," and nobody noticed until invoicing week. The estimate sat in a PDF in the client's inbox. The tracked time sat in a timer. The relationship between the two existed only in your head, reconstructed once a month from memory.
Ayron closes that gap by making the estimate a first-class object inside the project, not a document that lives somewhere else.
What "estimate ingestion" actually does
Open a project's detail pane on the Mac and you'll see an Ingest Estimate button. It opens a sheet that accepts:
- PDF — the file your client actually signed off on.
- Plain text or Markdown — the rough scope you sketched in a doc.
- CSV — exports from accounting or proposal tools.
Pick the file, and Ayron's AI digest pulls it apart:
- Categories — Development, Design, QA, Project Management, Research, Other — each with its allotted hours and amount.
- Line items — every row from the original document, preserved for review.
- Totals — the contracted amount and currency.
You confirm the parse, hit Save Stage Budgets, and the estimate is now attached to the project. The original document text stays accessible from a disclosure group on the project, so you can audit the parse later without re-opening the PDF.
A small but important design choice: ingesting an estimate does not create timer tasks. Tasks stay user-created; the estimate sets the budget those tasks measure against. That separation means an over-eager parse can't pollute your tracking ledger.
What you see after the estimate is saved
Once the estimate is in place, the project detail pane changes shape.
Estimate vs Actual, top of the pane
A single ratio: hours tracked / hours estimated. The bar fills as you log time. The color tells you the story without you having to think about it — secondary grey while you're under 85% of budget, orange between 85% and 100%, red the moment you cross.
The variance number sits next to the bar in hours, so "you are 6.3 hours over" is one glance, not a calculation.
Per-stage progress
Below the rollup, each stage from the estimate gets its own row — Design budgeted 20 hours, Development budgeted 40, and so on. As entries are logged to tasks mapped to those stages, the per-row bars fill. You can see at a glance that Design is on budget but Development is already 30% over with weeks of work left, which is the kind of finding that lets you act on a problem instead of discovering it.
Project Pulse
A rolling three-month sparkline of tracked hours per project, so you can see whether the work is front-loaded, accelerating, or stalled. Combined with the estimate bar, it's the difference between "we're behind" and "we're behind because everything stopped two weeks ago."
Why this is different from "I have a number in the project field"
Most time trackers let you type an estimated hours number on a project. That's a static input — a single integer that doesn't know what kind of work it represents.
Ayron's estimates are structured. The original document is preserved. The categories are recoverable. The line items are auditable. When the client emails three months in saying "I thought QA was included in the original quote," you can open the project, expand the original estimate text, and answer that question without searching your inbox.
The bar at the top of the project isn't a vibe — it's the rolled-up sum of every stage budget the AI extracted from the document you actually agreed to.
The workflow this enables
The point of all of this is the workflow it unlocks. Specifically:
Monday — kickoff. New project. Drag the signed estimate PDF into the ingest sheet. Review the extracted stages. Save. Total elapsed: under two minutes.
Tuesday through Friday — capture. Track time normally. Menu bar timer, voice timer, iPhone timer, doesn't matter. Every billable hour rolls into the stage it belongs to.
Friday — the 30-second margin check. Open the project. Look at the bar. If it's grey, move on. If it's orange, scope conversation Monday. If it's red, scope conversation today.
You used to need a spreadsheet, a recurring calendar reminder, and the discipline to actually open the spreadsheet. Now you need the discipline to glance at a colored bar.
Where this fits in the bigger Ayron loop
Estimate vs actual is the input side of the margin equation. The other side is what you eventually invoice — and Ayron rolls up tracked time into invoices directly, so the numbers you billed match the numbers you tracked. If you want to see the whole loop end-to-end, the timer-to-paid-invoice walkthrough covers it.
Estimates are part of Pro. The 14-day Pro trial is the easy way to try this on a project you already have under contract — ingest the estimate, log a few days of time, and watch the bar fill before you commit.
FAQ
Does this work on iPhone or the web? Estimate ingestion is a Mac feature today. The estimate itself syncs across devices, so the budget shows up on the project everywhere — but the ingest sheet (file picker, AI digest, review screen) is macOS only.
What if the AI digest gets the parse wrong? The review step is where you fix it. You can adjust categories, hours, and amounts per line item before saving. The original document text is also retained on the project so you can re-ingest later if the first pass was off.
Does ingesting an estimate change my tasks? No. Tasks stay user-created. The estimate saves stage budgets only. You can map tasks to stages when you create or edit them — but the ingest sheet won't generate tasks for you, by design.
What file formats are supported? PDF, plain text, Markdown, and CSV.