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CostDesk
Real-time job costing software
6 followers
Real-time job costing software
6 followers
Project finances shouldn't be a surprise. CostDesk gives project-based businesses a live view of cost, revenue, and profit, without waiting for accounting to close the books.
Most businesses still manage project finances with spreadsheets or complex ERP systems that don't reflect how work actually gets done.
Operations tools track tasks, not money. Accounting systems show numbers but only after it's too late. CostDesk closes that gap.
CostDesk is a real-time project financial management (job costing) platform that gives businesses clear visibility into costs, cash flow, and profitability while projects are running. It sits between operations and accounting, turning financial data into something teams can actually use every day.
Why CostDesk?
Real-time visibility into project financial health. Built for daily operations, not just finance teams. Integrates seamlessly with existing systems (API-first). Simple, clear, and scalable from SME to enterprise.
Built to Be Trusted
Developed by CHIPI LIMITED (New Zealand) and powered by professional cloud infrastructure, CostDesk is secure, reliable, and ready for global businesses.
The Value
Know earlier. Know clearly. Act faster.
The CostDesk free plan: what you get before you pay anything
CostDesk has a free plan that is free forever. Not a 14 day trial, no credit card, no sales call before you get in. You sign up on the web and start entering data from a live project the same morning.
This post is for people who have followed CostDesk for a while and have not signed up yet. We set out what the free plan includes, what it leaves out, who it suits and who it does not, so you can decide without asking us first.
Why we opened this plan
In our conversations with construction and project service firms, the thing blocking a start is rarely the price. It is the process: buying software means a proposal, a meeting, and waiting for someone else to agree. Every company has something more urgent than changing how it records cost. Six months later the work still runs on three spreadsheets, and nobody can say whether a project is making money until the final account is settled.
The free plan removes the waiting. One person, one project, nobody to ask. If this way of working fits your business, you will see it within a month. If it does not, you find that out early and it costs you nothing.
What the free plan includes
Limits:
- 1 user
- 10 projects
- 1 location
- 1 profit center
- 1 GB storage
- 100 transactions per month
Modules included: Company Finance, Project Management, Purchase Orders, Minutes, Expense Claims, Revenue, Accounts Payable.
Read that list as daily work and it comes to this: you set up a project, attach the budget by line item, record each cost as it happens, track supplier invoices you still owe, settle advances for the site team, and book revenue against each accepted stage. That covers the full money cycle of a project, from budget to profit and loss.
The point we want to stress: cost and revenue sit in the same place. That is why the free plan answers two separate questions a cost spreadsheet alone cannot separate, namely how much this project is making and how much cash is short right now.
What the free plan does not include
We would rather say this up front.
The free plan has no timesheets, no purchase requests, no role based permissions, no activity log, no multi currency and no approval workflow.
Approval is the largest gap against Pro, so it is worth holding on to: the free plan is a project cost ledger for one person to write and read, not yet an internal control tool for a team. It answers "where did the money go, is this project up or down". It does not yet answer "who approved this spend, who changed the figure and when".
Who it suits
It suits a business running one or two projects at a time, with one person who carries the whole money picture in their head. Usually the owner or the head of accounts.
The site team does not need a login and does not need to learn anything. They keep sending photos of receipts in the group chat as they do now. The difference is that one person enters those receipts against the right project and the right line item.
On capacity, 100 transactions a month usually covers one or two projects under construction. A residential build in the VND 2 to 5 billion range tends to generate somewhere between 30 and 60 documents a month, counting material purchases, supplier invoices, advances, plant hire and subcontracted labour. That is an estimate based on common project sizes rather than a measurement from our system, so check it against your own spend records.
The 10 project limit is storage capacity, not ten live sites running at full tilt. You can keep a few finished projects in there to look up old figures, one or two live ones, and a few you are still bidding on.
If your business runs four or five projects at once, or needs several people entering data, the free plan will feel tight within the first month. In that case we suggest picking one project and running it properly, then deciding whether to widen.
What free actually means here
Three commitments, so you are not left guessing.
There is no expiry date. No screen locking your data at the end of the month, no step forcing you to enter a card to carry on.
The data you enter stays yours when you upgrade. Three months of records on a project stay where they are, and from that point more people can work on them with you.
And you do not need to go through sales to start. Booking a demo is still there if you want to see the full feature set first, but it is an extra route, not a gate.
When to move to a paid plan
There are four signs, and all four are good ones because they mean the method is working: a second person needs to enter data, you want to approve a purchase before the money leaves the account, transactions pass 100 a month, or the business adds a branch and a separate profit center.
Pro costs USD 250 per month for a block of 5 users, excluding tax, with seats sold in blocks of 5. Billed annually it is USD 2,700 per year, saving USD 300 against twelve monthly payments. Customers in Vietnam are billed in VND at a local rate. Pro removes the caps on projects, locations and profit centers, raises storage to 10 GB and transactions to 1000 a month, and adds timesheets, purchase requests, role based permissions, activity log, multi currency and approval workflow.
What to do in the first four weeks
Sign up and click around, and you will have forgotten the password in a fortnight. This is the route that produces something you can read:
Week 1: pick one live project, set it up in the system, enter the budget by line item. Do not pick a finished project, because you need the figures to move.
Week 2: enter costs as they happen, once a day, about ten minutes. Materials, labour, plant hire, advances.
Week 3: enter unpaid supplier invoices and the stages already signed off. This is where the gap between profit on paper and cash in the account shows up.
Week 4: open the profit and loss report for that project and compare it with the number you have been carrying in your head.
Sign up at https://app.costdesk.co/en/signup?package=free&billing=monthly
A quick way to test whether you need this: take your most recently settled project and compare the final profit figure with what you estimated while it was still running. The gap between those two numbers is the money you are not seeing while there is still time to act on it.