We got tired of reconciling spreadsheets at midnight

Beacon started as a spreadsheet with too many tabs. We ran a small dev shop. Every month ended the same way. Someone, usually the person who least wanted to, sat down and matched estimates against logged hours against what each contractor was owed.

It took hours. It was error-prone. And it was where trust quietly eroded, because the moment a payout is late or wrong, the developer notices, and they remember.

We tried the obvious fixes. A project tool for the tasks. A separate timer for the hours. A spreadsheet to settle up. Each was fine on its own. The problem was never a single tool. It was the seams between them. Every time a number crossed from one system to the next, a human re-typed it, and that's where the money leaked.

The bet we made

Put the estimate, the time, and the payout on the same record, and the monthly reconciliation mostly disappears. That's the whole idea. Not more features, just fewer hops.

So an estimate isn't a number in a proposal you forget about. It's a record with a status and an owner, and it's the thing the logged hours roll up against, and it's what the payout is generated from. Approve it in two clicks. Watch the remaining balance update itself. Pay the people who did the work without opening a spreadsheet.

What we believe

A few opinions, since you're here:

Editing logged time should leave a mark. If an hour can be changed silently, every payout built on it is up for argument. So time changes go through a request a manager reviews. It's the one place we added friction on purpose.

Isolation isn't a feature, it's the floor. Multi-tenant has to mean one customer can never see another's data, enforced where the code touches the database, not hoped for in the UI.

Software should have a point of view. We'd rather do one thing, estimating, tracking, and getting paid, really well than be an everything-tool that does the important part badly.

We're a small team building this in the open with the shops and freelancers who use it. If that's you, we'd love to hear what's breaking in your month-end. Tell us.

Beacon is a sample product built for this marketing site, and the story above is illustrative.