Who is Rofinery for? Anyone who sells their time

We call Rofinery a project management platform for agencies. That’s true, and it’s where we started. But it undersells who it actually works for.

If your business makes money by selling time, the problems are the same however you describe yourself. You quote for work based on how long you think it will take or the value you’re providing. Your team does the work. Then you find out, usually too late, whether the quote was right.

A planning consultancy, a law firm, an accountancy practice, a design studio and a PR agency look very different from the outside. Inside, they’re all asking the same questions. Who’s working on what? Are we on budget? Is this client actually profitable? Can we take on that new piece of work, or are we already stretched?

We built Rofinery for ourselves first. We Create Digital, the agency behind Rofinery, is a web agency, and we needed one place to quote, plan, track time and see whether projects were making money. Nothing we tried did all of that without bolting several tools together or costing a ridiculous amount of money with constant upsells.

The more we built, the clearer it became that none of those problems were unique to agencies. Any firm where time is the product has the same gap between what was quoted and what was delivered, and the same margin disappearing into it.

Here’s how Rofinery works for five very different businesses.

Planning work rarely involves just your own team’s time. There are site visits, travel, application fees, and specialist reports from ecologists, heritage consultants or transport engineers. Those costs need recharging to the client, often with a markup, and they’re easy to lose track of when they live in someone’s inbox or a spreadsheet.

In Rofinery, expenses are factored into proposals at the start. You can add a markup, so recharged costs are covered properly rather than absorbed. When it’s time to bill, everything is already in one place.

Then there’s the engagement letter. A planning appointment can run for months, through pre-application, submission and determination, so what you commit to at the start matters. Rofinery supports two-person sign-off, so before an engagement letter or fee proposal goes out to a potential client, it has been reviewed and approved internally. No more proposals going out with a missed exclusion or an hourly rate from two years ago. You can also use templates to help cover off a lot of the foundation for the proposal at the start, without having to begin from scratch or copy and paste from somewhere else.

Law firms have tracked time for longer than almost anyone. The problem usually isn’t whether time gets recorded. It’s what happens to it afterwards.

A matter is estimated, the work starts, and the hours creep. Clients expect to be told when costs are going to exceed the estimate, and nobody wants it to come as a surprise to the partner either. In Rofinery, every matter has a budget and you can see time logged against it as it happens. When more time is needed, a request for additional hours can be raised and approved, so there’s a record of the decision and the client can be updated at the right point rather than at billing.

Rate cards make the mix of people visible. A partner, an associate and a paralegal all cost different amounts, and Rofinery reflects that in your estimates and in what each matter is really costing you. It also shows you where senior time is going on work that could have been done further down.

The same two-person sign-off that works for planning consultants applies here too. Engagement letters and fee estimates are approved internally before they reach the client.

Accountancy runs on recurring work. Year-end accounts, VAT returns, payroll and self-assessment come round for the same clients, on the same cycle, every year.

That makes templates important. In Rofinery you can set up a job once, with its tasks and checklists, and reuse it for every client and every period. Nobody has to rebuild the year-end process from memory, and the checklist means steps don’t get skipped when it’s busy.

Most practices charge fixed fees for this kind of work, which is where it gets interesting. Fixed fees only work if you know how long the job actually takes. Tracking time against each client shows you which ones are profitable and which ones have been underpriced for years because they always send their records late and in a carrier bag. That’s the information you need when fees are reviewed.

Then there’s January. Resource planning shows who has capacity in the weeks before a deadline, so work can be spread out rather than piled onto the same few people.

Design studios live with uneven demand. One month is quiet, the next you’ve won three projects at once. When that happens, most studios bring in freelancers.

Rofinery makes that easy. Freelancers can be added to projects (at no extra cost – they don’t cost you anything to add to your team), assigned tasks and log their time just like your own team, so you know exactly what that extra capacity is costing and whether the project still makes money. When the busy spell ends, they step away without leaving a trail of half-tracked hours behind.

Our Figma integration keeps design work connected to the project it belongs to, so designers aren’t jumping between tools to find the right file or log their time.

Rounds of amends are where design projects lose money. The brief said two rounds. The client is on round five. Tracking time against each stage shows you exactly when you’ve gone over, and gives you the receipts when you need to have that conversation with the client.

PR runs on retainers. A client pays a set fee each month for a set amount of time, but the work rarely arrives evenly. A launch or a crisis can swallow a week. A quiet month leaves hours sitting unused.

The hard part is seeing capacity across the whole team. Who’s stretched across too many accounts? Who has room right now, and who will have room in six weeks when the new client starts?

In Rofinery, you assign time to people on each retainer, and you can see across the coming months who’s overresourced and where the gaps are. That makes it quicker to say yes to new work with confidence, and to spot that someone is carrying too much before it starts to show.

Retainer projects roll over each month with the same team already assigned. Nobody has to rebuild the account every month or reassign the same people over and over again.

These are examples, not a complete list. Architects, engineers, surveyors, IT support providers and marketing consultants all sell time too, and they all have the same blind spots.

Every sector has its own language. A law firm has matters, a PR agency has retainers, an accountant has jobs. But the underlying question is the same: did we make money on the time we sold?

If you quote for work, plan your team’s time and want a straight answer to that question, Rofinery works for you. It covers everything in one place, from the first quote to the final bill. And because we don’t charge for onboarding or support, if your firm works in a way that doesn’t fit the standard setup, we’ll help you work it out.

Selling time and want to see where yours goes? Book a demo and we’ll show you how Rofinery would work for your business.