Project Management Software

As the studio grew, so did the number of projects running at once — and the distance between what we thought was happening and what actually was. Clients wanted to know where their work stood. We needed to know whether a project was still inside its hours while there was time to do something about it, not once the invoice was written.

Time was the constraint on all of it. Without a reliable view of where hours were going, resourcing decisions were guesswork, deadlines were optimistic rather than informed, and staying inside a client's budget depended on someone noticing in time.

Every off-the-shelf option we assessed solved part of it. None covered tracking, project visibility and accountability together, and none integrated cleanly with the accounting and ticketing systems we already ran on. Adopting one meant reconciling the gaps by hand, or reshaping how the studio works to suit the tool — adding process, which was the opposite of the point.

So we asked a more expensive question: what if we built our own? Not to solve the immediate problem, but to own the thing our operations run on.

Everyone has a different friction with time tracking, and a platform that only serves management gets filled in badly and late — which makes its data worthless. Getting those pain points on the table before we designed anything is what shaped the build.

Time tracking went in as the foundation, because it is the layer everything else depends on. Then we integrated with the systems already in use rather than replacing them: XERO for accounting, JIRA for tickets, and HubSpot more recently. Nothing had to be entered twice, which is usually where internal tools quietly die.

From there we added self-management, so people can see and organise their own work instead of waiting to be assigned it. That shifted TOOL from a reporting tool management reads to a working tool the team uses, which is what keeps the data honest.

We built it incrementally and in-house, releasing to ourselves as we went. Being our own client meant feedback was immediate and the cost of getting something wrong was low.

Time and tasks are tracked clearly enough that the team self-manages, and project transparency keeps work inside scope and budget rather than surfacing an overrun at invoice time. Clients know activity is tracked on a platform, and that visibility is a large part of why they trust the numbers we give them.

Building it in-house took recurring SaaS cost out of the business and left us in control of where the platform goes next — we extend it when we need to, rather than waiting for someone else's roadmap. It has scaled with every person and function we have added since, which was the original test.

There is also an octahedron on our desks for switching between tasks, which is a better prompt than a widget in a menu bar. A client portal is next, so clients can see and contribute to their projects directly rather than asking us for an update.