A development company rarely loses money on the code. It loses it around the code: the fixed-price build that took a third longer, the support hours that ran past the retainer, the change agreed in a chat thread and never priced, the estimate made without looking at what the last similar project really took.
The issue tracker cannot answer those questions, because it counts tickets and story points, not money. Accounting cannot answer them either, because it sees invoices, not hours. The answer sits between the two, and in most companies it lives in a spreadsheet someone updates at month end.
"},{"heading":"What to track outside the backlog","html":"A client web platform is sold at 30,000. The estimate is 400 hours at a blended cost rate of 38, plus 2,000 of third-party costs such as licences and hosting during the build. Planned cost is 17,200 and the margin is 43%.
Integration work runs long and the project takes 520 hours. Cost rises to 21,760 and the margin falls to 27%. The price could carry up to 736 hours before the project stopped making money: (30,000 − 2,000) ÷ 38.
| Estimate | Actual | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | 30,000 | 30,000 |
| Hours | 400 | 520 |
| Cost at 38 an hour | 15,200 | 19,760 |
| Third-party costs | 2,000 | 2,000 |
| Margin | 43% | 27% |
The figures illustrate the method. The useful part is seeing the drift at 300 hours, while there is still time to raise a change request, rather than at 520. Fixed price or hourly covers how to choose the model per project.
"},{"heading":"Support retainers","html":"A support contract sells, say, 40 hours a month for 2,400. In a busy month the team uses 55. Without a written rule, those 15 hours are simply absorbed, and the retainer’s real rate drops from 60 to about 44 an hour.
Agree the rule before the first month: extra hours billed at the contract rate, rolled into next month within a limit, or declined. Then record support work against the retainer project every day, so the overrun shows up in week three, not on the invoice.
"},{"heading":"Choosing software for a development company","html":"Start on Launch’s 7-day trial; timesheet approval, recurring invoices and profitability need Core. Questions about your set-up? Write to us.
"}]},"keyFacts":[["What it manages","Project budgets, logged hours, agreed changes, support retainers, invoices and profitability for client work."],["Dev tools","It works next to Jira, GitHub and GitLab and does not replace them; there is no integration with them today."],["Agreed changes","An agreed change is added as its own task with an estimate, so its hours stay separate."],["Not included","No sprints, story points or code links, no client-facing quotation delivery, and no API until it ships on Scale."]],"faq":[["Does PLYNTUM replace Jira or GitHub?","No. Keep your backlog and code where they are. PLYNTUM holds the business side: project budgets, logged hours, agreed changes, retainers, invoices and profitability."],["How do developers record time in PLYNTUM?","Against tasks for the phases or features you estimated, with a manual timer or a timesheet. From Core, managers approve weekly timesheets; hours count as project cost as they are logged."],["Does PLYNTUM integrate with Jira, GitHub or GitLab?","Not today. An API and webhooks are planned for the Scale plan. If hours must sync automatically from tickets, PLYNTUM is not the right fit yet."],["How do I track a fixed-price project’s margin?","Set the project’s value and each person’s loaded hourly cost. From Core, logged hours become cost as they are recorded, so you see the margin fall while the project is running, not after the last invoice."],["What does PLYNTUM cost for a 25-person development company?","Scale covers up to 25 members for $450 a month, or $360 a month billed annually, and adds workload and capacity planning. Core covers up to 10 members for $150."]]}