Cases by Source

Cases by Source manufactures custom cases. Sales runs in HubSpot, and the design and engineering work runs on monday.com boards that carry each project from file setup through tech discovery, rendering, customer approval, quoting, and release to production. The workflow itself was well defined. The team had it written out step by step, with an owner for every task. What monday could not do on its own was execute it. Each new design project or quick quote needed its own set of templated subitems, assigned to the right designer, sales rep, or supply chain team, with due dates that moved as work progressed. Handoffs between design and sales depended on someone noticing a status change and sending an email. And when a HubSpot deal reached the technical discovery stage, someone had to create the monday item by hand.

By 2025 a second gap had opened. The design team had no time tracking at all. Leadership could not see actual hours by project, customer, or person, could not compare actuals against estimates, and could not see forward capacity across the designers.

We used to support monday.com implementations as a partner, and this engagement is that work. The support side ran through 2024 and 2025 as a set of Zapier automations wired into the monday boards, with zaps that create the full templated subitem tree when a design project or quick quote is kicked off, assign each subitem to the right person or team from a lookup table, push due dates forward as prior steps complete, and email the sales rep when a rendering is ready for the customer. A separate zap watches the HubSpot sales pipeline and creates the monday item when a deal hits technical discovery, parsing the customer and project names into their own columns and resolving the HubSpot rep to the monday person column.

In 2025 the client asked about time tracking. We reviewed three monday-compatible options in a written comparison covering entry workflow, approvals, rates, and reporting, and recommended Tracket. We then implemented it with a project-level time entry model on the projects board, required entry fields for customer, phase, and R&D eligibility, an automation that keeps actual hours updated on each project item, estimate versus actual with a simple variance per project, saved views for weekly oversight by person, a monday Workload view for forward capacity, and a recorded training session for the team.

New projects arrive on the boards with their task trees, owners, and due dates already in place, and the design-to-sales handoffs fire on status changes instead of on someone remembering to send an email. Deals stopped needing manual re-entry from HubSpot into monday. On the time side, designers log hours directly on the project item, leadership sees actuals by project, customer, and person for any period, and the R&D eligibility flag is captured at the moment time is entered rather than reconstructed later.

The Zapier layer is doing what a purpose-built system would do natively, covering templated project creation, assignment rules, notifications, and a CRM handoff. Given the same problem now, we would build Cases by Source one production system that owns the workflow end to end, with time tracking, capacity, and the sales handoff built in rather than stitched across three subscriptions and a middleware account.