Fixed-price project tracking
Stay inside scope on flat-fee work. Enter the fee and target rate to calculate an hours budget. Watch it burn down in real time. Catch scope creep at 80%, not the day before delivery. Protect the margin you priced for.
Free plan. No credit card.
The burn-down is your real-time margin indicator.
Fixed price is fine until the scope moves
Flat-fee projects are simple to invoice and easy to sell. They are also where service businesses quietly lose money, because nobody is tracking the cost side.
Tracking hours on a fixed-price job does not change the price you charge. It changes how soon you notice the scope problem.
- The $15k website ran 230 hours. Nobody noticed until invoice day.
- "One small tweak" turns out to be 8 hours of work and nobody invoiced for it.
- The change-request arrived as a line in an email and was never recognised as one.
- Next year you quote a similar project at the same price, because you have no idea what the last one cost.
- Team morale dips because the project that "should be done" keeps grinding on.
Fixed-price projects, with the visibility of a retainer
A budget that does not reset, a warning while you can still act on it, and real cost data when the job closes.
A budget that doesn't reset
Enter the agreed project fee and a positive target hourly rate. Hour Cap calculates the hours budget and shows how much effort has been used. Add a remaining-work estimate to forecast the hours at completion.
- Fixed budget in hours per project
- Burns down across the whole project, with no period reset
- Visual progress bar the team sees every time they log
Catch scope creep at 80%
The project budget meter shows hours used and remaining, so you can review scope before the allowance is exhausted. Overruns stay visible and time tracking continues.
- Hours used, remaining and over budget on the project
- The dashboard makes the at-risk projects obvious
- Overrun hours are still tracked, never silently dropped
Globex · Website rebuild. 34 of 40 hours used, with 6 hours of budget remaining.
Review the remaining scope against these 6 hours before agreeing to more work.
Real margin data, project to project
Compare the agreed fee with all completed project hours, including non-billable work. Administrators and owners can see profitability when dated pay rates are complete. Expenses, overheads and tax are excluded.
- Project value, planned hourly return and hourly return to date
- Worker costs and margin to date when pay rates are complete
- Separate hourly time-value reports and payroll exports
Next quote: probably price the next one closer to $8k.
Scope creep arrives by email
Scope rarely changes in a meeting. It changes in a message that begins "while you are in there, could you also". Nobody calls that a change-request, so nobody prices it, and eight hours later it is part of the job.
Keep client requests in a shared inbox and log the time spent answering them against the relevant project. Review its budget when deciding whether a request changes the scope.
- Keep client requests and replies in a shared conversation
- Log time from the conversation against the relevant project
- Time answering the request lands on the same project budget
Loving the new logo. While you're in there, could you also do the email signatures and the deck template? Should be quick I imagine.
Happy to take both on. They are outside the brand refresh scope, so I have priced them as a small add-on and sent it through for approval before we start.
How to run a fixed-price project
Turn the fee into hours, watch those hours, and let the closed project price the next one.
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Budget
Convert the fee into hours
Create the project, choose Fixed fee and enter the agreed value. The hours budget is calculated from that value and your target hourly rate, which defaults to the organization rate.
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Watch
Glance at the burn-down weekly
The amber projects are this week's conversations. Requests that would move the scope are visible as they arrive, rather than as an unexplained jump in the meter.
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Close
Learn what it actually cost
Review the hours, the internal cost and the margin. That number is what you should be quoting from next time, instead of the number you charged last time.
What changes on the next flat-fee job
Common questions
Why I built Hour Cap
I'm Jonathan, a freelance web developer in Brisbane, Australia. After 15 years, I wanted my client work to run on one system instead of separate tools that didn't handle retainers or Xero, copy/paste errors, and time that never got invoiced. I needed one tool that handled retainers, fixed-price, and hourly projects, let me write proper multi-line descriptions, showed me what was actually profitable, and pushed straight to Xero as invoices. Nothing did all of it, so I built one. Today it is pivotal to my business: all my time tracking, invoice drafting, and profitability runs through Hour Cap, and it scales the same way for agencies and teams.
Independent and self-funded. When you email support, you reach the person who built it.
More about JonathanDefend the margin you priced for
Track every fixed-price job from quote to close, including the requests that quietly change the scope.