Trackline for software & IT services

Know whether the fixed-price project is still profitable before the invoice, not after

A software house sells the same hours two ways: a fixed price with milestones, where every extra hour is margin lost, and a retainer with monthly periods, where unused hours are goodwill and overused ones are unpaid. Both are usually judged at invoice time, from a spreadsheet rebuilt every month. Trackline judges them while the work is happening, from the hours engineers already logged.

Talk to us Everything Trackline does

Included in every plan. No per-seat charge, no per-tool upsell.

In practice

What Trackline does for software & IT services

Model each engagement the way it was sold

A fixed-price project gets milestones with schedule and effort health; a retainer gets recurring periods with a burn against the agreed hours. Internal platform work is a project too, so the true cost of the product sits beside client revenue.

Cost per engineer, computed at read time

Hours logged in AMS are costed at each engineer’s rate from their Ledgr pay profile the moment you look, never stored. A rate change after a raise is reflected in every project instantly, historically and going forward.

Estimation accuracy per project and per person

Estimated against actual effort, tracked per milestone and per engineer, so the next quote for a similar build is grounded in what the last three actually took rather than what they were sold at.

Staffing suggestions from real availability

Who is free next week is read from logged hours, leave in AMS and the engagements they are already on, so a new client project is staffed from capacity that exists rather than capacity a spreadsheet assumed.

One platform

Where Trackline hands off for a software team

Trackline is the single owner of projects on the platform: AMS logs time against its list and Cadence mirrors it for the boards. That is why an engagement’s hours, cost, bugs and tickets appear here without anyone entering them twice, and why the engineer-facing view shows each person their own projects and hours without the margin data.

Software & IT · Trackline

Questions software teams ask about Trackline

Where do the hourly rates come from?

From each engineer’s pay profile in Ledgr, which derives an hourly rate from their salary and the organisation’s working-hours rule. Trackline reads it at query time, so cost is always current and nothing about pay is copied into the delivery tool. Members without payroll data are costed at a rate you set on their profile.

Can a client see their own project’s status?

Not directly today. Trackline’s views are for your team: the portfolio dashboard, per-project health and the employee-facing view of a person’s own projects. A client-facing status page is on the roadmap but is not available, so reporting to clients is an export or a call.

What happens to a retainer’s unused hours?

Each retainer period records the agreed hours and the hours logged against it, so unused or overused hours per period are visible at a glance. Whether they roll over is a commercial decision you make with the client; Trackline records what happened rather than enforcing a policy.

Want Trackline set up for your software team?

It comes with every plan, alongside the other tools. Tell us your team size and we set up a working organisation for you to try.