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For firms that bill their time

Know the margin before the invoice

Cost rates and billable rates on the same card, utilization you can see mid-month, and timesheet compliance that starts by showing you the gap rather than blocking anyone. Rate cards and cross-project reports are on every plan, including Free.

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Cost from logged hours at the cost rate, revenue from the same hours at the billable rate, and the gap between them as a number.

Written for five kinds of firm

All of them share one property: the thing being sold is people’s time, so utilization and rate are not reporting details, they are the business model.

IT consultancies and MSPs

Fixed-fee and time-and-materials engagements running side by side, often for the same client, with utilization targets per grade.

Digital and creative agencies

Retainers plus project work, where scope creep shows up as unbilled hours long before anyone reopens the contract.

Engineering consultancies

Long programs with staged deliverables, subcontractors, and a schedule the client reviews as closely as the invoice.

Advisory and management consulting

Small senior teams at high rates, where a few unlogged days a month is the difference between a good quarter and an average one.

In-house delivery teams that bill internally

Shared-service and transformation teams charging back to business units, which needs the same rate and utilization machinery.

Hours in, margin out

Four steps, in the order they actually have to happen. The tier is on each one, because a services firm reads tiers before it reads features.

Get the hours in

Timesheets Pro; capture apps every plan

Hours land against the task, not a separate timesheet app nobody opens. Approval chains route to whoever actually signs off, and the browser extension, desktop apps and phone companions make logging a ten-second act rather than a Friday afternoon.

Price them properly

Rate cards every plan

Three scopes, per user, per role and org default, with date ranges and overlap validation so two cards cannot silently disagree. Each card carries a cost rate and, separately, a billable rate or a markup, which is what makes margin a number rather than an estimate. Multi-currency throughout, with the exchange rate snapshotted at entry time so last quarter does not move when today's rates do.

See utilization before the month ends

Pro

Billable versus total hours per person per week, a four-week forward forecast, and over-allocation visible before you commit someone to a third engagement. Industry benchmarks put average billable utilization just under 70%, which means most firms are looking for a few points, not a transformation, and a few points only show up if you can see the week you are in.

Report to the client and the partners

Cross-project reports every plan; dashboards Pro

Cross-project reports normalize mixed currencies and share by link without a seat for the recipient. Earned value gives the client a defensible position on a fixed-fee job, and the dashboard builder gives each partner the view they keep asking for instead of a monthly spreadsheet.

Start at visibility, not enforcement

Four rungs, and most firms should stop on the first or second. They are listed in order so you can pick the lowest one that solves your actual problem.

  1. 1

    Visibility

    Pro

    Compliance shows who is behind, by how many hours, and what that gap costs at their rate. Nothing is blocked and nobody is chased automatically. For a lot of firms this is the whole fix, because the problem was never that people refused, it was that nobody could see it until invoicing.

  2. 2

    Reminders

    Pro

    A nudge to the person the hour before their deadline, and a Monday digest to whoever owns the number. Timed against the organization's own working week rather than a fixed UTC hour.

  3. 3

    Escalation

    Enterprise

    A staged chain over days: the person, then their approver, then the owner. Three templates ship, from a light two-nudge chain for creative teams to a strict one for firms under audit obligations, so you are picking a posture rather than building a workflow.

  4. 4

    Hard lock

    Enterprise

    New work is blocked until the prior week is submitted. Exempt roles and date-bounded exceptions handle sick leave and onboarding, and the gate deliberately fails open, because a transient error must never stop a whole firm working. Most firms should never turn this on; it exists for the ones whose obligations require it.

Plan tiers, plainly

  • Every plan, including Free: Rate cards in all three scopes with the cost-versus-billable split and markup, multi-currency with historical FX snapshots, cross-project reports with shareable links, the capture apps, and the AI assistant.
  • PRO: Timesheets and approval chains, resource capacity with the billable view and forward forecast, compliance visibility and reminders, earned value, and the dashboard builder.
  • BUSINESS: Portfolios with RAG rollup across the client base, goals, advanced AI for risk detection and portfolio insight, webhooks and integrations for the finance system.
  • ENTERPRISE: The enforcement layer: escalation chains, hard-lock mode, date-bounded compliance exceptions, Revenue at Risk, and audit-grade evidence export with a read-only token for an external auditor.

Per-seat prices and the full matrix are on the pricing page.

5.0 / 5

“Enterprise-Grade Project Management with a Modern AI-Powered Collaborative Edge”

It combines enterprise-grade project management features like Gantt charts, dependencies, and portfolio management with a modern AI-powered and collaborative experience. It feels like a strong modern alternative for organizations moving away from Microsoft Project.

Waheed H.

Manager · Small Business (50 or fewer employees)

via G2, May 7, 2026

Walk the ladder against your own approval process

Bring how your firm approves time today, who signs off, and what your obligations actually require. We will map it onto the rungs above and tell you which one to stop at, including when that answer is the free one.

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What operators ask us

Including where it falls short, which is the one worth reading first.

We invoice from Xero and QuickBooks. Does this replace that?▾
No, and it should not try to. Onplana owns the delivery side, which is where the numbers are made: who worked, on what, at which rate, against which engagement, and what margin that produced. It feeds the accounting system through exports and webhooks rather than competing with it. Firms that expect a PM tool to also be their ledger usually end up with a worse version of both.
Our consultants already resist timesheets. Will another tool help?▾
Not on its own, which is why the honest sequence starts with visibility rather than enforcement. Hours are logged against the task people are already looking at, and captured from a browser extension, a desktop app or a phone, so the act takes seconds. Then compliance shows the gap and its cost before invoicing rather than after. Escalation and hard-lock exist, but a firm that opens with them is usually solving a visibility problem with a discipline tool.
What does the margin number actually come from?▾
Each rate card carries a cost rate and either an explicit billable rate or a markup percentage, and the resolver reports which of the three derivations produced the figure, so a rate with no margin configured is visibly that rather than silently equal. Cost comes from logged hours against the cost rate; revenue from the same hours at the billable rate. Where a project is not billable you mark it so, and it stops flattering the utilization figure.
We work in several currencies. Does last quarter change when rates move?▾
No. The exchange rate is snapshotted on each timesheet entry when it is created, and historical reporting uses that snapshot rather than today's rate, so a closed quarter stays closed. Live views use current rates, which is the correct behavior for a forward-looking number and the wrong one for a past one.
Can an external auditor get at the evidence without a full seat?▾
Yes, on Enterprise. Evidence export runs to CSV or JSON and there is a dedicated read-only token scope for exactly this, so an auditor can pull compliance evidence without being able to read projects, tasks or members. Granting an auditor a normal account is the usual workaround and it hands over far more than the engagement needs.
Which plan do we actually need?▾
Pro for most firms: it carries timesheets, approvals, capacity with the billable view and forecast, earned value and dashboards. Rate cards, multi-currency and cross-project reports are on every plan including Free, so the margin question can be explored before spending anything. Enterprise is for the enforcement and evidence layer, and is worth it when an obligation rather than a preference is driving the decision.
Where does this fall short for a services firm?▾
There is no invoicing, no accounts receivable and no payroll, by design. There is no built-in CRM, so the pipeline lives elsewhere and the engagement starts here. And the resource planner works in hours and allocation rather than modelling a bench with skills matching, so firms whose core problem is staffing a bench against skills will find that part thinner than the financial side.

Put your rates in and look at a real month

Rate cards, multi-currency and cross-project reports run on the free plan, so the margin question is answerable before you spend anything.

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Already set up? Open rate cards to add a billable rate.