Real project margin, straight from your Jira.
Jira tells you what was done. Saldo tells you what it cost — and what it earned: a financial layer that turns worklogs into live profit and loss by project, sub-project, role and employee.
Built inside a working agency before being opened to others. No per-seat pricing. No re-platforming.
Founder-built. Deployed inside a real agency. Then opened to others.
Saldo was built by its founder, Ernest — for himself, to answer the margin questions he could not answer with the data he had at the time as CTO of a 120-person digital agency on Jira in Europe. Jira told him what was done; the spreadsheet was always a quarter behind reality; the only honest answer to the CFO and CEO each week was “let me get back to you”. So he built the layer he needed.
He then deployed that layer inside the agency where he was CTO. The first version pulled worklogs every night, multiplied by each person’s real hourly cost, allocated overhead pro-rata, compared against the estimate. Thenthe real number became visible — and the conversations with the CFO and CEO changed shape.
Two years of internal use later, every project at that agency runs through the layer. Feedback came from finance on Mondays and from PMs on Fridays. On the back of that, Saldo became a standalone product, and is now opening to a select group of other digital agencies on Jira who recognise the same problem.
A 120-person digital agency in Europe, two years on Saldo.
Five categories of analysis built only into Saldo.
Each addresses a specific failure mode of agency margin tracking. None exist in financial plugins on the Atlassian Marketplace, in cheaper time-tracking tools or in spreadsheet workflows. Together they are why agencies adopt Saldo despite the higher subscription line — and why it pays back at every size.
What you sold to the client, not what you planned to spend.
Financial plugins track the budget you set internally — a planning lid against your team's spend. Saldo tracks the contract figure you signed with the client: the agreed scope, the role breakdown, the fixed price or T&M ceiling. These are different planes. The first asks “are we within our internal budget?” The second asks “is this project profitable for the agency?” Margin lives in the gap between them.
Read the essay: What Project Margin Actually IsPro-rated overhead, not just labour cost.
Your office, marketing, non-billable salaries, software stack, support team — these are real costs every project benefits from. Most tools either ignore them at project level or push them into a manual Excel allocation. Saldo distributes overhead across active projects proportional to revenue share, with a minimum-revenue floor to keep slow months from distorting the maths. The margin you see is the margin that is actually there.
Three project types, costed correctly.
Development projects bill T&M or fixed price. Support runs on a fixed monthly retainer. Internal work does not bill at all but consumes real money — your team’s hours, your overhead share. Saldo treats them as three architectures with different cost logic. Most plugins treat every project the same way. Your accounting team does not.
Read the essay: The Three Project Types Every Agency RunsSenior covering junior, wrong people, wrong rate.
A senior at £85/hour internal cost picks up a junior task billed at £75/hour. Twelve hours later, the project has lost £120 silently. Multiply across a week, across a team. Saldo detects these patterns automatically and shows margin variance by cause: wrong people on the project, wrong rate applied or scope creep. Three different problems, three different fixes. Most tools aggregate the variance and tell you “over budget”.
Read the essay: Senior Developers Doing Junior Work, in PoundsManager view: PMs see hours, finance sees money.
Most financial tools show one truth to everyone with access. Project managers end up seeing costs they should not be optimising against. Engineers see margins that change how they work. Saldo separates the views structurally: PMs see hours and role overruns — the metrics they can act on. Finance sees money. Same product, two lenses. Trust scales further than control.
Read the essay: Manager View: Why Your PMs Shouldn't See MarginsOne Saldo. Four views of the same project.
The agency owner
“Stop guessing your margins.” Open Saldo on Monday morning, see every active project ranked by margin and risk, drill into the ones bleeding cash, fix them this week.
The CFO / finance director
“Plan vs actual on every project, automatic.” Hourly costs with audit-trail snapshots. Overhead allocated correctly. Sales bonuses computed off real profit, not optimistic estimates. PDF and Excel exports built in.
The CTO / engineering lead
“See where the team is actually spending its hours.” Role overruns, where seniors are covering junior work, which sub-projects are eating velocity. Pace and margin in the same view, without dragging engineers into a finance tool.
The project manager
“Know when a project goes off-budget — before it ends.” Manager view shows hours and role overruns, not money. The people who can fix it see what they need to fix it. Finance keeps finance.
Read-only on top of your existing Jira. Nothing changes for your team.
Saldo is not a financial plugin and does not behave like one. It connects to your Jira Cloud or Data Center through the standard REST API in read-only mode and adds the analysis layer that the plugins on the Marketplace do not deliver. Your team keeps logging hours exactly the way they do today.
Read-only Jira connection
Standard Jira REST API. Saldo pulls worklogs, issues, epics, projects and statuses. We never write back. Your CTO can verify the OAuth scopes during connection — read-only is the only permission requested.
Any worklog source works
Saldo reads native Jira worklogs, time-tracking plugin worklogs or any other worklog data sitting in Jira. Most financial plugins on the Marketplace require their companion time-tracking plugin to function. Saldo does not. The choice stays with your team.
Fifteen-minute setup
Connect Jira credentials, set hourly costs once, see live margin the same day. No tool migration, no retraining, no companion plugin, no rebuild of how the team logs time. The analysis layer is the only thing that changes.
One flat price. Every Jira user included.
The Standard plan covers most agencies. Enterprise is for distributed teams, dedicated cloud or regulated industries. Curious before the demo? — run your numbers through the ROI calculator and see what Saldo would recover at your size.
Standard
£2,499/mo
Flat. Every Jira user included — engineering, design, ops, leadership. No seat counting, no surprise invoices.
Read-only connection to Jira Cloud or Data Center
Pre-sold contract tracking
Pro-rated overhead allocation
Three project types: Dev · Support · Internal
Role-mismatch detection with margin variance
PDF + Excel exports
Manager view (hours-only)
EU / UK regions on AWS
£23,990 / year (save £6,000)
Enterprise
from £5,999/mo
For larger agencies, distributed teams, or agencies serving regulated industries.
Everything in Standard
Dedicated Cloud — your own isolated Saldo instance, by default
Cloud region of your choice (AWS, GCP or Azure)
SOC 2 Type II report
Signed SLA on response and uptime
SSO with Okta, Entra ID, Google Workspace
Multi-language UI for distributed teams
Custom integrations and bespoke reports
Dedicated customer success manager
Asked on demo calls. Answered honestly.
See your real saldo on a project that’s already running.
Fifteen minutes, your real Jira instance, our screen. We pull two recent projects and walk you through what the real margin looks like. You leave the call with the answer.