A small software company running several clients: which tool should it use for the work and for client reporting?

A small software company needs two things: a task tracker the team really works in, and a way to show each client their own work without preparing a report by hand. The two can be joined with a spreadsheet, guest access or a client portal. SLAtech Vantage sits on top of the tools you already have and adds the client side; it does not replace the task tracker.

What breaks with five clients instead of one

With one client you can remember everything. With five, the monthly reporting becomes a job of its own: collecting hours from time tracking, attaching them to tasks, writing a summary, and answering "where did the hours go" yet again.

The problem is not the task tracker. The problem is that the client is not in it, so everything they know passes through one person on your team. When that person is on holiday or busy with an incident, the client simply does not know what is going on.

The usual setups

• One task tracker and a spreadsheet per client. Simple and cheap. Every month somebody rebuilds the spreadsheet.
• A task tracker with guest access for each client. The client sees live progress, but also what was written for the team, and usually not the hours and money.
• A service desk with a built-in client portal. Suits tickets and support, and requires moving your work into it.
• Your existing task tracker with a client layer on top. The team does not move, and the client view is built from the data.

What to check before choosing

• Whether the work has to move. A tool that demands a migration usually does not get adopted;
• Isolation between clients. One client must not see another client's project, not even by mistake;
• Who sees money. Rates and margin are an internal matter, including toward your own employees;
• How long the monthly report takes once the tool is running, not in the demo.

How SLAtech Vantage answers it

SLAtech Vantage connects to your task tracker (among others Jira, Azure DevOps, Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Linear and monday.com), to time tracking, to a Gmail mailbox, to the code repository and to monitoring. Each client has a project of their own, and the client's access is confined to that project.

The client signs in to a portal that carries your company's mark and sees a monthly report by department, a summary written automatically, and hours tied to tasks. From a client's spec you can produce a proposal broken into modules, with an hour range for each module, in the project's currency and with its VAT.

What stays on your side

Rates, cost and margin, internal notes, the internal split of hours and discussion between your people are private by default. The client sees exactly the same billed hours, without the split. The email screens, the error list and the warnings journal belong to your side only.

Inside the team too, the right to see amounts is granted to each person by name. The owner always sees them, and an employee sees them only if it was opened to them.

What it does not do, and when it is not worth it

• it does not replace the task tracker, and it does not keep books. Creating invoice documents in iCount is built and switched on per agreement, and no other accounting system is supported;
• the connections read from your tools and do not write to them, except Freshservice.

And if you have one client and a spreadsheet that works, change nothing.

Frequently asked questions