About Saldo

The workshop behind the tool.

Saldo is one of a small portfolio of operations tools made by Stoneyworks, a workshop based in London. We’ve been building tools for distributed and multi-location operations since 2008. Saldo is the financial-layer chapter.

Our story

From spreadsheets to a real-time P&L layer.

2008

A workshop, not a startup

I started building operations tools for distributed businesses — knowledge bases, training sites, audit forms, internal trackers. Each one solved a slice of the problem. None of them held together. The pattern was always the same: you can train people, but they can only follow what they understand.

2022

CTO of a 120-person agency, no real-time margin

As CTO of a 120-person digital agency on Jira, every week the CFO and CEO would ask me margin and profitability questions I could not answer with the data I had. The spreadsheets were always a quarter behind reality. So I built the financial layer I needed — wired into Jira, my own tool, just for the questions in front of me. Then I deployed it inside the agency where I was CTO.

2024

Two years in production

Every project at the agency runs through the layer. Estimate by role rate, actual by employee cost, overhead pro-rated, sales bonuses computed off real profit. Feedback comes from finance on Mondays and from PMs on Fridays. The tool I built has settled into the way the agency runs.

2026

Saldo becomes a product

Out of those two years of production use, Saldo becomes a standalone product for other digital agencies on Jira who recognise the same problem. Flat £2,499/month — no per-seat charges. Small group on purpose: every customer gets a real conversation, not a chatbot. Stoneyworks ships it alongside Franchise.Family and onboarding.team.

What we believe

Five principles we don’t compromise on.

Eat your own dog food, or don’t ship it

Every product Stoneyworks publishes runs inside our own operations first. If we wouldn’t use it on Monday morning, no one else should pay for it on Tuesday.

Layer on top, don’t replace

Your team already lives in Jira. Saldo doesn’t replace it, doesn’t reorganise it, doesn’t demand a migration. It reads what’s there and adds the financial layer that was missing.

Flat pricing, no surprises

Per-seat pricing punishes you for adding the people who most need to see the truth. We charge a flat fee and include every Jira user. The bill is the same in January and in October.

Manager view, not surveillance

Hours and overruns belong to PMs. Money belongs to finance. The same Saldo, two lenses. Trust scales further than control.

Small group on purpose

We don’t spam-blast outbound. Each conversation is researched and personal. We’d rather have ten serious customers than a hundred polite no-shows.

British craft, not corporate veneer

Stoneyworks is named after the building we work from — Stoney Works, 8 Stoney Lane, London. The name is a reminder: we’re a workshop, not a vendor.

Who built it

Saldo is built by Ernest and the team.

Ernest Barkhudarian
Ernest Barkhudarian
Founder of Saldo · former CTO

I am Founder of Saldo and Founder of Stoneyworks — the London workshop that ships Saldo alongside Franchise.Family and onboarding.team. Before either, I was CTO of a 120-person digital agency on Jira in Europe. That is the agency where I deployed Saldo internally for the first time — as my own tool, built for the questions the CFO and CEO would not stop asking, and put into production in the place I knew best.

Long before that, I was running operations across multi-location businesses — flower delivery networks, e-commerce, retail. Same wall every time: how do you make a hundred different places feel like one company? Same answer every time: you can’t do it from a spreadsheet, and you can’t do it with surveillance.

I kept building tools — a knowledge base here, a checklist app there, a training site for one client, an audit form for another. Each one solved a slice of the problem. None of them held together. Saldo is the financial-layer chapter of the same workshop, applied to the same problem from a different angle — and the chapter where two years of running my own tool inside a real agency turned it from a CTO’s side build into a product. That agency stays anonymous on this site, by the same promise we make every Saldo customer.

The name Saldo is the position. It’s the bookkeeping word for the real balance — what’s actually left after every entry, not what the optimistic estimate said. That’s the only number that matters at the end of a project.

Read my Field Notes

See what Saldo shows on a project that’s already running.

Fifteen minutes, your real Jira instance, our screen. We pull a couple of recent projects and walk you through the real margin.

Book a 15-min demoSee pricing