I built Hourglass because I was tired of finding out a project had lost money after it was finished.
It connects time tracking, project budgets, team capacity and delivery in one place — so you can see what's actually happening while there's still time to fix it. No enterprise PSA price tag, no months-long implementation.
14-day free trial · Full feature access · No credit card required
10
Built-in reports
14
Day free trial — full access
UK
Built & supported in the UK
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Data isolated per organisation
I was working somewhere that replaced an expensive PSA with a free time tracker. It saved money, but suddenly we were using spreadsheets for budgets, another tool for planning, and another process for reporting.
The information we actually needed — are we going to make money on this project? Are we going to finish it on time? Is the team overloaded? — became surprisingly difficult to answer.
So I built Hourglass.
Anthony, Founder of Syncrasoft
What's actually happening across your projects right now
The Hourglass dashboard gives agency directors and consultancy managers a live snapshot of active projects, budget health, team hours and overdue tasks — without opening a single spreadsheet.
- Live revenue and projected profit for the month
- Budget burn and RAG health across all active projects
- Hours logged this week vs previous week
- Projects at risk, overdue and closing this month
The reports you'll actually use
Project profitability, resource utilisation, client billing summaries, executive overviews — the core reports are already built in and ready to run across any date range, team or client. No setup.
- Project Profitability — margin per project vs billing rates
- Resource Utilisation — billable vs non-billable time split
- Client Billing — export-ready summaries for invoicing
- Executive Summary — organisational performance in one view
Schedule the team and see delivery timelines in one place
A drag-and-drop weekly planner for resourcing, and a Gantt-style portfolio view for delivery timelines across every active project — so you can see who's scheduled where, and what's coming up, without switching tools.
- Drag-and-drop weekly planner with capacity and time-off indicators
- Gantt view with task dependencies and drag-to-reschedule
- Portfolio view showing every active project's timeline side by side
- Spot overloaded engineers and rebalance before delivery slips
One place to see what's coming up
Weekly capacity, Gantt timelines and portfolio view — no switching between tools to work out who's free and what's overdue.
Give clients the information they need — not your whole system
Invite client contacts directly from their client record. They get a secure, branded portal showing their projects, budget consumption, team and upcoming milestones — with no access to your internal data.
- Invite by email in one click from the client record
- Budget bars, hours logged and remaining per project
- Upcoming milestones and project end dates at a glance
- Fully isolated — clients never see your rates or financials
Nothing more than they need to see
Budget, milestones and their own team — that's it. Billing rates, internal reports and other clients are hidden at database level, not just in the UI.
Native integration
Invoicing that plugs directly into Xero
Connect your organisation to Xero once, then push invoices generated from logged time straight across — no exporting CSVs, no manual re-keying, and payment status syncs back automatically.
Everything I wanted from a PSA, without the PSA-sized price tag.
Three questions I built Hourglass to answer for every project, every week.
Is this project actually making us money?
Hourglass works that out as your team logs time. You can see the budget, expected margin and actual position without rebuilding a spreadsheet at the end of the month.
Who can actually take the next project?
A drag-and-drop weekly planner shows every engineer's scheduled work, capacity and time off, so you can see who's overloaded and who has room — and rebalance before delivery slips, not after.
Which projects should I worry about?
Budget burn, RAG status and overdue milestones are surfaced before the project becomes a problem — with an estimated £ figure at current pace, not just a colour, so you know how much it matters.
Let Hourglass explain what's going on
Powered by AIGot a report with 200 rows of numbers? Hourglass can summarise the important bits, flag unusual results, and explain where things need attention — so you don't have to dig through every line yourself.
We don't think every professional services firm needs a £50k PSA.
A timesheet isn't useful if nobody knows what the number means. Your project manager shouldn't need five tabs open to answer "are we on budget?" We'd rather build 20 features people actually use than 200 that sit there unused.
Stop rebuilding the same spreadsheet every month.
Project profitability. Budget tracking. Client billing. Team utilisation. Executive summaries.
Run the numbers whenever you need them — across any date range, team or client, with CSV and PDF export.
Common questions about project profitability and time tracking software for professional services.
What is Hourglass?
Hourglass is a professional services automation (PSA) platform built for agencies, consultancies and MSPs. It combines time tracking, project management, resource planning and profitability reporting in one tool — giving teams real-time visibility into which projects are making money and which are at risk.
How do agencies improve team utilisation?
By making utilisation visible in real time. Hourglass shows planned vs logged hours per engineer per week, highlights over and under-utilisation, and lets project managers rebalance workloads before delivery suffers. Billable utilisation rates are calculated automatically across any date range.
How do consulting firms track project profitability?
By connecting time logged to billing rates and project budgets. Hourglass calculates cost vs revenue per project automatically, showing true margin per client engagement without manual spreadsheets. Project profitability reports can be exported as CSV or PDF.
What is the best PSA software for small professional services firms in the UK?
Hourglass is designed specifically for small to mid-size UK professional services firms — agencies, consultancies, and MSPs — that need the delivery visibility of enterprise PSA software without the cost or complexity. Starter plan is free; Pro is £12 per user per month.
How do you prevent project overruns in a professional services firm?
With always-current budget tracking and RAG health scores. Hourglass shows budget burn rate as work is logged, flags projects at risk with amber and red status, and gives project managers the data to intervene before overruns happen.
How do professional services firms reduce reporting effort?
By using a platform where all data is captured at source. Hourglass generates 10 built-in reports — from executive summaries to client billing — instantly, across any date range, without manual data collection. Reports can be summarised with AI in one click.
What time tracking software is best for agencies?
Agencies need more than a timer — they need to see how logged time affects project budgets, client billing and team utilisation. Hourglass combines time tracking with live profitability and delivery management, purpose-built for agency workflows.
Can Hourglass replace spreadsheets for project budget tracking?
Yes. Hourglass replaces manual budget spreadsheets with live budget tracking that updates as time is logged. Budget burn rate, hours remaining and RAG health scores are always current — no exports, no formulas, no reconciliation needed.
Does Hourglass include a client portal?
Yes. You can invite client contacts directly from their client record in Hourglass. They receive a secure, read-only portal showing their projects, budget consumption, hours logged, team members and upcoming milestones — with no access to your internal data, billing rates or other clients. Clients log in with their own account and are completely isolated from your internal app.
Free resource
Delivery Visibility Health Check
A practical self-assessment for professional services teams. Understand where your delivery visibility gaps are, what they're costing you, and which metrics to track first.
Free tool
Project Profitability Calculator
Enter a project's fee, hours and cost rate, drag the scope-creep slider, see the margin instantly. No signup required.
The problem wasn't time tracking. It was knowing what the time actually meant.
Hourglass started as a fix for a problem I was living with every day. My employer had moved away from an expensive enterprise PSA (professional services automation) platform onto a free time tracking tool, and while the switch saved the company a genuine amount of money, we lost most of the features we'd come to rely on. Budget visibility, utilisation reporting, project profitability — all of it disappeared overnight, and the replacement setup left us stitching together several separate applications just to get through a normal working day.
That wasn't a good way to work. Switching between tools to track time, check budgets, plan resource and pull reports for clients was slow, error-prone and, frankly, demoralising for a delivery team that just wanted a clear view of how projects were actually performing. So I built Hourglass to close that gap: one platform with the core features a professional services firm actually needs, without the enterprise price tag or the months-long implementation.
Since then, Hourglass has gone from strength to strength, and I'm now confident it can help other agencies, consultancies and MSPs in the same position — businesses that don't want (or can't justify) an enterprise PSA, but still need real project profitability tracking, team utilisation reporting, and increasingly, AI-driven insights to help them run delivery more effectively.
Hourglass isn't trying to be another bloated enterprise platform. It's a modern, sensibly-priced alternative built by someone who's actually lived the problem — and who's still building it with that same problem in mind.
— Anthony, Founder of Syncrasoft
More than a time tracker.
Hourglass isn't built to count hours. It's built to tell you whether the project is actually going to plan.
Using a free timer today?
Looked at enterprise PSA?
Live in a few minutes, not weeks. No mandatory setup — invite your team and log time immediately, configure billing rates whenever you're ready.
Pricing
14 days free.
All features included.
Every new account gets a 14-day trial with full access — no credit card required. All prices in GBP.
Starter
Up to 3 users · forever
- 14-day full-feature trial
- Time tracking
- Project management
- Basic reports (3)
- Up to 3 members
Pro
- Everything in Starter
- Engineer Planner
- All 10 reports
- Teams & roles
- Budget tracking & RAG scores
- Time off management
- CSV & PDF export
- AI report summaries & insights
Business
- Everything in Pro
- Priority support
- Custom billing rates
- Full audit log
- SLA guarantee
- Dedicated onboarding
- AI budget risk & anomaly analysis
Stop discovering overruns at month-end.
Hourglass moves project profitability from retrospective to real-time — so your team can fix problems while there's still time.