pia Agentur ERP
For years the agency moved between tools for time tracking, projects and invoicing. Some did far more than a small team needs and buried the daily work under settings. Others were simple but missed the parts that matter at the end of a month.
So we built our own ERP. It keeps only what the agency really uses every day and adds the few things no tool on the market offered at the time. One login, one place for hours, projects, offers, invoices and the working time rules that come with employing people.
One tool instead of five tabs
Problem
Hours lived in one app, working time in a spreadsheet, offers in documents and reminders in someone's head. Every month end meant copying numbers between them.
Goals
Log a day of work in seconds, on desktop or phone.
See budgets and unbilled hours without asking anyone.
Turn hours and offers into invoices without typing twice.
Check working time against the law automatically.
Keep every number traceable back to a single hour.
Keep, cut, add
Before designing anything we went through every screen of the tools the agency had used and sorted each feature into three piles.
Keep
Time entries with project and task, client records, offers, invoices and reports.
Cut
Resource modules, deal pipelines, custom fields nobody filled in and a full CRM system.
Add
Working time checks, month close, holiday requests that update planning, reminders that wait for approval and a payroll ready monthly report.
The result is a product with fewer screens than any of the tools before it and more of the work done for you.
Grouped by job, not by data
The navigation follows the day. Daily work sits on top, then projects, then billing and insights. Everyone on the team sees their own hours, absences, tasks and projects. The admin also sees invoices, offers, reports and settings.
Quiet by design
People spend whole days in this app, so the interface stays calm. A warm neutral base keeps numbers readable, one lilac accent marks the next action and three status colours carry meaning, never decoration.
Everything is built from tokens and components in Figma that match the code one to one. Colours, spacing and radius are variables. Buttons and inputs carry every state as a variant and screens are assembled from the same parts the app uses.
The everyday views
Time tracking
Day view and week grid. Each day shows booked time against the working time target, so gaps are visible before the month ends.
Projects
Budget lights turn amber at 80 percent and red when a project runs over, long before the invoice.
Invoices and offers
Documents are written in the app with text blocks, then sent as branded PDFs. Payments, partial payments and credit notes stay on the same record.
Planning
Hours per person and week, with holidays and sick days already subtracted from capacity.
Working hours
Start, end and breaks per day, checked against the legal limits, with an overtime balance that is always current.
Reports
Utilisation, revenue and open items per person and month, exported in one click.
Mobile
Logging time and checking the week works just as well on a phone.
Years of history, zero differences
Switching tools only works if nothing gets lost. All clients, contacts, projects, time entries, offers and invoices from the previous tool were imported with their original numbers. An automated check then compared every record with the source and reported zero differences before the old tool was cancelled.
Less admin, more agency work
One tool replaced several subscriptions and a stack of spreadsheets.
Month end went from a day of copying numbers to a review and a click.
Budgets and unbilled hours are visible to the admin at any time.
Working time rules are checked every day instead of once a year.
Every amount on an invoice can be traced back to the hours behind it.
The best internal tool is the one nobody has to think about. The app does the bookkeeping in the background so the team can spend its time on the work clients pay for.
Next Project
Proposal Studio
