A 120-person digital agency in Europe, two years on Saldo
This is the founding agency — the 120-person digital studio in Europe where Saldo's founder deployed his own tool internally during his time as CTO there, and where it ran for two years before becoming a product. The tool itself was the founder's own work; the agency was where it was put into production, refined under real worklogs, and validated against real CFO and CEO questions. The agency is anonymous by design: we do not name customers, and we do not name the founding agency either. The numbers below are published with permission; everything that could identify the work has been scrubbed. We do not run reference calls with other customers — your data is yours, theirs included. The most useful thing we can offer is the way to see your own saldo on your own Jira — a 15-minute demo on your live instance does exactly that.
Two years, three numbers.
The story, in four parts.
The starting state
Forty active projects on Jira, three operating regions, sub-project structure Jira itself does not encode (the Development build, the rolling Support retainer, the Internal management work). Margin was reconstructed in a spreadsheet on the last working day of the month. By the time the spreadsheet was finished, the project was three weeks past the point where the margin slip could have been corrected.
The agency had tried two cost trackers before. Both stopped at labour — no overhead allocation, no role-rate variance, no separation between client-paying and internal time. Both punished growth: per-seat pricing meant every new hire bumped the bill regardless of whether they were billable.
What changed when Saldo was wired in
Estimates moved from 'hours' to 'role × hours × role-rate'. Actuals were costed against each individual's real hourly cost, not the role rate. Overhead was allocated to every project pro-rata to its share of monthly revenue, with a minimum-revenue floor for slow months. Three sub-project types — Development, Support, Internal — each costed correctly.
Engineering did not change tooling. Worklogs were already in Jira. The only operational shift was: every employee got an audited hourly cost number, and every sub-project got a one-line type tag. That was the whole onboarding.
The first quarter on Saldo
Within the first reporting cycle, three projects flagged margin variance. One was a long-running build where seniors had quietly absorbed work below their rate (–11 percentage points). One was a Support retainer subsidising the Development side of the same client (the retainer was repriced at the next review). One was an Internal sub-project that had grown into 30% of an account manager's week without anyone noticing.
All three had been profitable in the spreadsheet view. None of them were profitable in the saldo view.
Where the layer sits today
Two years in, every project across the agency runs through what is now Saldo. Finance closes the month in 30 minutes against the previous half-day. Sales bonuses are computed off real profit, not estimated revenue, which has changed the projects salespeople bring in. Manager view (hours-only, no money) lets PMs and CTO leads see role overruns without the agency having to expose individual rates.
This is the founding agency, and the only engagement whose metrics appear on the site. Other Saldo customers exist; their data is theirs and we do not publish it. The most honest proof we can offer prospects is a 15-minute demo on their own Jira — same product, their projects, their real saldo, walked through with us live.
“We stopped looking at the invoice and calling it the margin. Saldo gave us the saldo — and once you have seen the real number, you cannot unsee it.”
Skip the case study. See your own saldo instead.
We do not run reference calls with other Saldo customers — their data is theirs. The most honest proof we can offer 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.