I'm looking for suggestions for solutions that will be well suited for a design
consulting environment.  There are so many out there now, it is hard to know
where to start.

A primary goal is to improve visibility of project budgets.  Ideally features
will allow users to track how resources for a project are initially allocated
(hours, purchases, etc), how much has been billed/completed, how much remains.
A lesser priority is to use for purpose of prioritizing and tracking tasks.
Download to Quickbooks for accounting a plus.  Would be used by 20-30 people in
various departments.

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We use Pivotal Tracker for prioritizing and tracking tasks and it has been extremely useful. It has tremendously improved our team communication and productivity.

Unfortunately, I don't know if it can track resources as well.

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I know a number of smaller firms are very happy with Marketcircle's Daylight (Project Management) and Billings. Ramp up time is not too bad...

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I'm not certain if this is what you were after but in the design consulting world more and more firms appear to be using Deltek Vision.  We have run Vision since '06.  I know Continuum has been running vision a bit longer. Vision was originally designed for the architectural/civil engineering industry and has very deep penetration in that industry. 

http://www.deltek.com/products/vision/

Vision is a full ERP system that runs pretty much every aspect of our business including CRM, proposal tracking, project/resource planning, purchasing, expense reports, time reporting, project management, accounting (including AP/AR), invoicing, etc.

I'm not certain how useful it would be if it wasn't that fully integrated so I'm not certain if it makes sense outside of the consulting end.  Much of the structure and overhead exist to drive accounting features and if you're not doing that I'm not certain it would be my first choice.  It works pretty well for our business but it wasn't particularly easy or cheap to implement. 

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hope all is well.  I do some work with a consulting firm.  They use http://www.dovico.com/ to track time and expenses.  It's managed online so we just log in to enter data.  It's pretty good at generating reports on a project or task basis.  Hope this helps.

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I'd love to know if anyone has this mythical piece of software!  We've been doing this manually with a fairly elaborate spreadsheet with graphics and all, but alas, it doesn't tie into our accounting system!

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I ended up doing things over time in a combo of Wiki to Ning to Filemaker database (with a little Excel thrown in for good measure). I work on projects that are large, amorphous and with long timelines (museums). So I needed something fairly custom...