Case studies

One case study. The one we can publish honestly.

We publish one case study — the 120-person digital agency on Jira where Saldo’s founder deployed his own tool internally during his time as CTO, anonymised. It is the only engagement whose metrics we share at this depth, and the only one we ever will. Other Saldo customers exist; their data is theirs and we do not publish it. Not summaries, not anonymised metrics, not logos. Your data is yours is the promise we make to every customer, and a page of nameless logos is not how we keep it.

What we publish instead are Field Notes— essays from inside the agency where Saldo was built and deployed. Read Field Notes

The founding agency

120-person agency. Two years of internal use.

Published in fullEuropean mid-cap clients40+ active projectsOn Saldo since Q2 2024

£200–600K of recovered margin a year, an 8-hour close that runs in 30 minutes, and 42% fewer overruns caught at the post-mortem.

Forty active projects on Jira, three operating regions, sub-project structure Jira itself does not encode. Margin reconstructed in spreadsheets at month-end. Two failed attempts at cost-tracking plugins before the founder — CTO of the agency at the time — rolled out his own internal layer, the tool that later became Saldo. The full story walks through the starting state, what changed when the layer went in, the first quarter on the new model, and where the agency sits today.

Read the case study

Patterns, not customer stories

What Saldo surfaces, across the agencies that adopt it.

We will not publish customer-specific case studies, but the patterns Saldo surfaces are the same across most of the book of work. Four of the most common margin leaks we see in the first quarter on the system — described without identifying anyone — below. Each maps to one of the five categories of analysis on the home page.

A retainer that was quietly subsidising the build alongside it

A long-running Support engagement looks profitable in aggregate. Once it is carved into its own sub-project with a fixed monthly budget, it turns out the Development side has been quietly funded by it for months. The retainer is repriced at the next review and both sides clean up.

Margin moving where the senior is, not where the budget said it would

A six-figure landing-page project looks tight on the role-rate estimate. Actuals show seniors covering junior tickets at higher real cost. The labour-margin report says nothing has gone wrong; the saldo report says the project earned 8 percentage points less than it had to. The remedy is a different staffing plan, not a heroic recovery.

Internal time growing into a third of an account

An account manager spends roughly 30% of their week on internal coordination for one client — calls, status updates, expectation management — without ever being charged to a deliverable. Without a separate Internal sub-project, this time disappears into overhead, where it inflates the agency’s effective overhead allocation across every other engagement.

Sales bonuses paid on a number that turns red within months

A salesperson lands a high-priced engagement and is bonused on invoice value at the close. Six months later the project is in the red on the saldo report. The agency has effectively paid the salesperson to bring in a loss-making client. The fix is bonus structure, not the salesperson.

Skip the case study, see your own.

We do not run reference calls with other Saldo customers. The most honest proof is the same product running on your real Jira: a 15-minute demo on your live instance, walked through with us, with the real margin on your real projects in front of you by the end of the call.

Book a 15-min demo Or run the ROI calculator first