Dashboard for an agency
It puts the team’s hours, their cost rates and outside spend against the price of each project. An overrun shows up halfway through, not in a report after delivery.
- Buildfrom $1,700
- Timeline2–4 weeks
- Supportfrom $420/mo
Who this suits: Studios and agencies where profit is worked out after a project closes, hours are logged whenever somebody remembers, and the friendliest client turns out the most expensive.
What is in the first version
- hours by project
- cost rates
- contractors and spend
- plan and actual
The figures above are the package this sits on: Dashboard and analytics. Anything past its edges the calculator adds before the work starts, not after.
How the path goes
- 01
An hour lands on a project
Hours are read from the tracker the team already uses, and time attached to nothing appears as its own line.
- 02
The hour turns into money
At that person’s cost rate for that date, plus contractor invoices and anything bought for the project: cost accumulates continuously.
- 03
The project meets its own price
Fixed price, retainer and hourly count differently, and the screen shows how much budget is gone while work still runs.
What decides whether this works or annoys people
Hours are filled in on Friday
Hours from memory are an estimate, so the same-day share is on screen and a low-share period is marked approximate.
A cost rate is not salary
Salary over actual hours makes an overworked project look profitable, so the rate is salary, taxes and overhead over a fixed norm.
A delivered project keeps eating hours
Revisions and support run for months after delivery, so a project stays open for costs until you close it yourself.
What to measure once it is live
- share of hours logged the same day
- margin by project and by client
- gap between planned and actual cost
- hours attached to no project
Why this comes out faster
The shape of this one is known: the states, the edge cases and the things that usually go wrong have been decided before. Nothing here is a template, and the saving is not in your half of the work. It goes into your process, your content and the systems this has to talk to, which is the part nobody can have solved in advance.
A likely stack for this
Picked against the task when we scope it, not decided in advance. This is the shelf it usually comes off.
- Collection from trackers and accountingPythonFastAPIn8nTemporal
- Data and cost computationNode.jsPostgreSQLPrismaRedisClickHouse
- The screen and the reportsTypeScriptReactNext.jsTelegram Bot APIDockerGrafana
Price it yourself, right here
Five steps, and you can see the number without leaving a contact. The estimate accounts for the kind of work, what you already have and what it will need inside.
These bills do not come from us
- paid tiers on the time and task trackers
- tracker seats for contractors
- access to accounting or payroll services
- hosting and the server for the history
Asked before the first call
- We already have a time tracker, does it have to go?
- No. Hours are read from whatever the team uses now, and what lives here is what a tracker does not hold: the cost rate, the project price and outside spend.
- Will the team read this as surveillance?
- The screen counts projects, not people against each other: no screenshots, no activity tracking, no keystroke counters. A person sees their own hours, and nobody sees a colleague’s rate except the role you name.
- If we raise the rates, does the history recompute?
- No. Every rate carries a start date, past projects stay costed at the rate in force while they ran, and a retroactive recompute happens only when you ask and name the period.