Live project profitability
Time and cost joined to the fee on every project, visible while there is still time to change course. One screen, no month-end exercise.
You are paying five tools to not talk to each other.
Agencies and consultancies stitch together a project tracker, a timesheet, a chat tool, a drive and an invoicing app. The gaps between them are where margin quietly disappears. We close the gaps, usually without replacing the tools you like.
Where it comes from today
- Trello, Asana or a spreadsheet for projects
- A separate timesheet nobody fills in daily
- Slack or WhatsApp for approvals
- Drive folders for deliverables
- Invoicing app with numbers copied in by hand
One project record
one record- Status
- tracked
- Owner
- tracked
- What is owed
- tracked
What happens without you
- Project margin visible during the project, not after it
- Retainer overruns caught in week two instead of at month end
- Client sign-off with a timestamp and a name against it
What this actually looks like day to day
If more than one of these lands, the tools have become the constraint rather than the help.
Nobody knows if a project is profitable until it ends
Hours sit in one tool and the fee sits in another. By the time anyone compares them the project is delivered and the lesson is too late to act on.
Retainers are burned through invisibly
A retainer's remaining hours are worked out on request, by hand. Scope creep is discovered at the end of the month rather than at the moment it happens.
Approvals live in chat and cannot be proved
Sign-off is a message in a thread. When a client says they never approved it, there is no record with a timestamp and a name attached.
Invoicing is a re-keying exercise
Someone reads the timesheet, works out the billable total, and types it into the invoicing tool. It is slow, it happens late, and it is where billing errors come from.
What we build for agencies and consultancies
Specific pieces of work, each quoted separately, so you can start with one and add the rest when it has paid for itself.
Retainer burn-down clients can see
Hours used against hours bought, updated as work is logged, shown to the client in their own portal. Scope conversations happen early and with numbers.
Approvals with a record
Deliverables go out for review with a real approve action, a timestamp and a named person. The audit trail exists without anyone maintaining it.
Invoices raised from the actual work
Billable time and fixed fees flow into a draft invoice for review, then out to the client. Nothing is re-keyed and nothing is missed.
What is different afterwards
- Project margin visible during the project, not after it
- Retainer overruns caught in week two instead of at month end
- Client sign-off with a timestamp and a name against it
- Invoices drafted from real logged work with no re-keying
The services this usually involves
- Custom business softwarefor agenciesHours live in one tool and the fee lives in another, so profitability is a month-end discovery rather than a working number. By the time anyone compares them the project is delivered and the lesson has no project left to apply to.
- Systems integrationfor agenciesNothing in your stack is the wrong choice. The problem is the seams: the same project exists five times, and somebody reads one tool and types into another so that the month can close.
- Client and customer portalsStop answering the same status question.
Tell us how your agency actually runs.
Forty-five minutes, no preparation, no obligation. You get a written summary of what we would fix first and roughly what it involves.