Costlocker – Focus on the ROI

Without a true measurement of the costs and profits associated with individual projects, it’s virtually impossible for businesses to get a true measurement of how they’re performing on a financial level. Costlocker is a web-based application that provides tools for evaluating the financial performance of individual projects, employees, or agencies as a whole.

Costlocker measures the profitability of your work by comparing the costs and revenue generated by each project your company handles. In addition to tracking the time you and your employees spend working on individual projects, tasks, and activities, Costlocker also analyzes projects based on the revenue, profit margin, and associated costs. Keep your estimates and invoice information saved in Costlocker, and the platform will measure how much your business has lost financially as a result of underestimated hours. You can also compare projects to determine which types of clients provide the greatest value for your business, relying on a cashflow system to ensure the data you’re looking at is always up to date.

Costlocker provides managers with valuable tools for evaluating the performance of employees. Using the system, managers can follow their employees’ workloads and review how much revenue each employee brings in. This information is incredibly useful when it comes to reviewing employee performance, since Costlocker’s recommendations are based purely on data rather than emotion or feelings.

Practical Uses:

• See which types of projects are providing the most value for your company
• Track the workloads of individual employees
• Find out which activities are generating a loss for your agency
• Track the time your employees spend working on each client project

Insider Tips:

• Enter your overhead costs into Costlocker’s cashflow system
• Integrate Costlocker with your Basecamp account
• Import tasks from the Cost Estimator into your to-do lists on Basecamp
• Employees have the option of tracking their time, or manually adding worked hours to the Timesheet

What we liked:

• Businesses can measure the value of clients based on actual profitability, rather than sales alone
• Costlocker complements existing project management and planning apps
• The cashflow tools allow users to see how much they’re going to bill clients for each month
• Users retain ownership of the data they enter into Costlocker

What we didn’t like:

• Nothing

Alternatives:

• Harvest – http://www.getharvest.com
• Toggl – https://www.toggl.com

Company Info:

• Launched: November 2013
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: Prague, Czech Republic
• Founded by: 2FRESH
• Web site: https://costlocker.com

Costs:

• Small Team accounts start at $9 per month
• Medium Team accounts start at $149 per month
• Large Team accounts start at $379 per month