Software for Engineering Firms
An engineering practice sells hours against a fee. Whether a commission made money is decided by what those hours really cost and how many of them the job eats. SUNAGO Matrix derives the first from salary, capacity, holiday and real utilization, and reports the second while the work is still running.
A fixed fee turns every hour into a decision
On a time-and-materials job an extra hour is extra revenue. On a fee-based commission it is not: the fee is already agreed, so every additional hour comes straight out of the margin. That single difference is why engineering practices need different software from the general project management market, and why a task board tells you almost nothing about whether the work is going well.
The trouble is that the fee looks healthy for most of the commission's life. Hours accumulate quietly, the drawing set grows, a client asks for one more option, and the overrun only becomes obvious near the end - by which point the choices are to absorb it or have an awkward conversation about scope.
Two numbers change that, and both have to be right. What an hour of your team costs, honestly rather than conveniently. And where the commission lands if it carries on the way it is going. SUNAGO Matrix computes both continuously, from the same logged hours your engineers already record.
What an hour actually costs
One engineer, EUR 70,000 annual gross salary, 25 days holiday, full-time. The rate most firms use on the left, the derived rate on the right. Illustrative figures on a 1,850-hour nominal year and firm overhead of EUR 20 per billable hour.
| Step | Salary over a nominal year | Derived from real utilization |
|---|---|---|
| Hours the salary spreads over | 1,850 | 1,850 less 185 holiday hours, times 70% utilization = 1,166 |
| Salary cost per billable hour | EUR 37.84 | EUR 60.03 |
| Overhead share per billable hour | Usually omitted | EUR 20.00 |
| True cost per billable hour | EUR 37.84 | EUR 80.03 |
| Margin at a EUR 95 charge-out rate | 60% | 16% |
Same engineer, same salary, same charge-out rate. One method reports a commission at 60 percent margin, the other at 16. A practice bidding on the first number will keep winning work at EUR 95 an hour and keep wondering why a full order book does not turn into cash.
The gap widens as utilization falls. At 55 percent rather than 70, the same engineer costs over EUR 96 per billable hour all in, and EUR 95 is a loss on every hour booked. In SUNAGO Matrix this rate is system-calculated from the figures held against each employee, so it moves when their utilization moves and every project reprices with it.
What an engineering practice runs on
Every module on one plan. No consultancy edition, no finance add-on.
Real cost per hour, live profit and loss, Forecast at Completion and financial danger warnings on every project, with a drill-down across time, materials, external services and expenses.
Learn moreThe whole team on one allocation heat map, coloured by how committed each person is, with anything past 100 percent in red. Allocate by percentage of a day or a fixed block of hours.
Learn moreWeekly timesheets logged against a commission and its phases, split billable and non-billable at entry, through manager approval before anything becomes an invoice.
Learn moreBudgets held at phase level so variance shows up in the phase that caused it, with dependencies, a risk registry, and external services and materials on the project.
Learn moreLeads, a weighted pipeline forecast, and proposals with digital signature built to eIDAS, ESIGN and IT Act requirements. A signed contract converts into a project.
Learn moreUtilization per person and team against their own targets, project margin across the portfolio, and revenue per employee, all on the same dataset as the invoices.
Learn moreOne utilization target for the whole practice is the wrong target
Engineering practices are unusually mixed. A principal wins work, holds the client relationship, checks drawings and still bills. A graduate engineer bills almost everything they do. A technician sits somewhere in between, and the person running the office bills nothing at all.
Holding all of them to one firm-wide number means the principal is permanently failing and the graduate is permanently comfortable, and neither figure tells you anything you can act on. So every employee carries their own budgeted utilization rate, and rates can be set month by month, because a realistic August in a practice where half the office is away is not a realistic October.
Those targets are not decoration. Utilization is one of the inputs to cost per hour, so the rate you set for a person reaches every commission they touch. It is reported per person and per team in the employee reporting.
If you are looking at Deltek
Deltek is the incumbent in this market and Ajera and Vantagepoint are serious products with a long history in architecture and engineering. If you need full project accounting with a general ledger inside the same system, that is their ground and they cover it.
The practical difference for a smaller practice is what it costs to find out. Deltek publishes no price for Ajera: the route is a demo request. SUNAGO Matrix is EUR 3 per seat per month billed yearly, on one plan, from a single seat, and you can price out a team of six before speaking to anyone. The side-by-side, with sources and read dates, is on the Deltek comparison.
Further reading: resource planning for engineering firms, timesheet software for engineering firms and how to calculate a true cost per hour.
Software for engineering firms: common questions
Cost rates, fee-based commissions, utilization targets and what it costs.
What does an engineering firm need that generic project software does not give it?
How is cost per hour calculated?
Can we set different utilization targets for different roles?
Does it handle fee-based commissions rather than time and materials?
How does it handle subconsultants and external services?
What does it cost, and how long does it take to get running?
Know where a commission lands before it lands
EUR 3 per seat per month billed yearly, every module included, free onboarding and data transfer. 14-day trial, no credit card required.