Stay inside scope
on flat-fee work
Set an internal 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.
Fixed price is fine, until it isn't
Flat-fee projects are simple to invoice and easy to sell. They're also where service businesses lose the most money, quietly, because nobody's tracking the cost side.
- 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.
- Next year, you quote a similar project at the same price because you have no idea what the last one actually cost.
- Team morale dips because the project that "should be done" keeps grinding on.
Tracking hours on a fixed-price job doesn't change the price you charge. It changes how soon you notice the scope problem.
Fixed-price projects, with the visibility of a retainer
A budget that doesn't reset
Set the total hours for the project once. Track time against it. The burn-down is your real-time margin indicator.
- One-off hours budget per project
- Burns down across the whole project, no period reset
- Visual progress bar, the team can see it every time they log
Catch scope creep at 80%
The alert threshold flags when you're heading for overrun while there's still time to renegotiate scope, sequence work differently, or have the conversation with the client.
- Configurable threshold per project (80% is the sensible default)
- Dashboard makes the at-risk projects obvious
- Overrun hours still tracked, never silently dropped
Real margin data, project to project
When the project closes, you know what it actually cost. Use that to price the next one properly. Stop quoting from memory.
- Total hours by member · total revenue · effective rate
- Project-level revenue report exportable for finance
- Compare projects: which clients are profitable, which aren't
Next quote: probably price the next one closer to $8k.
Run a fixed-price project without losing money
Convert fee to hours
Divide the agreed price by the blended team rate. That's your internal budget.
Set the project budget
Create the project, enter the budget, set the alert threshold.
Watch the burn-down
Glance at the dashboard weekly. The amber projects need a conversation.
Close and learn
Review the actual cost. Next quote, you know what to charge.
Stop pricing the next project from memory
Hours-tracked fixed-price projects give you real cost data and weekly visibility.
What changes on the next flat-fee job
Fewer death-march projects
You see the trouble at 80%, not week 9.
Conversations, not write-offs
Scope creep becomes a discussion, not a quiet loss.
Smarter quoting
Last year's actual cost informs next year's price.
Better team morale
When the team can see the budget, they help defend it.
Common questions
How do I track a fixed-price project?
Convert the agreed fee into an internal hours budget based on the rates of the people doing the work. Track time against the project as normal. Watch the budget burn down in real time. If you hit 80% with too much scope left to deliver, you know to renegotiate or eat the cost; you don't find out a week before the deadline.
What's the difference between a fixed-price budget and a retainer?
A retainer is recurring with a per-period cap that resets (8 hours every month). A fixed-price project is a one-off budget for a defined scope that doesn't reset. Hour Cap handles both: retainers for ongoing work, fixed-price budgets for project-based scopes.
Why track hours on a fixed-price project at all?
Two reasons. First, profitability: you can only price next year's projects accurately if you know what this year's actually cost in hours. Second, scope: tracking shows when an apparently small change-request is, in fact, a third of the original budget.
Can I bill milestones on a fixed-price project through Xero?
Yes. Create the milestone invoices in Hour Cap and push to Xero as drafts. Line items can be fixed-fee chunks rather than per-hour. The hours tracked against the project remain internal data for margin tracking and don't have to appear on the invoice.
What happens when a fixed-price project overruns?
Hour Cap keeps tracking the hours and shows the overrun against budget. The decision of what to do is yours: have the scope conversation with the client, write off the overrun, or convert remaining work to T&M. The data supports any of those conversations.
Defend the margin you priced for
Free to start. Track every fixed-price job from quote to close.