I Was Spending 6 Hours/Month on Admin. So I Built My Own ERP.

Every month, the same ritual. Copy time entries from Toggl into a FreshBooks invoice. Cross-reference project hours against Trello boards. Paste numbers into an Excel spreadsheet to figure out whether a client was actually profitable. Archive the spreadsheet in Google Drive. Six hours gone — hours I could have spent on billable work.

I’m an IT consultant. My clients pay me for my expertise, not for my ability to operate five disconnected SaaS tools. But for years, that’s exactly what I spent a significant portion of my time doing.

The Five-Tool Problem

Here was my stack:

• Togglfor time tracking — great at what it does, but it stops at the timer.
• FreshBooksfor invoicing — solid, but it has no idea what I tracked in Toggl.
• Trellofor project management — visual and easy, but completely disconnected from my financials.
• Excelfor profitability analysis — a monthly spreadsheet ritual that was fragile and error-prone.
• Google Drivefor document storage — the junk drawer that held it all together (barely).

Total cost: roughly $55/month. Total time spent on admin: 6 hours every single month. And the worst part? I still never had a real-time view of which clients were profitable and which were quietly eating into my margins.

The “Aha” Moment

It hit me during a particularly frustrating invoicing session. I’d tracked 47 hours across three clients in Toggl, but FreshBooks had no way of knowing that. I was manually re-entering time entries, line by line, into invoices. One copy-paste error and a client gets billed for the wrong amount.

I realized the problem wasn’t any individual tool — each one was fine in isolation. The problem was the gap between them. No tool on the market connected time tracking → invoicing → profitability in a single flow designed for freelancers and small consultancies.

Why Existing Solutions Didn’t Work

I spent weeks evaluating alternatives:

• Scoro— Comprehensive, but starting at $28/user/month with a 5-user minimum. That’s $140/month for a solo freelancer. Not a fit.
• Harvest— Time tracking and invoicing in one place, but no real project management, no profitability dashboard, and (as we now know) vulnerable to acquisition-driven pricing changes.
• Bonsai— Designed for freelancers, which is great. But no profitability reporting, limited project management, and their pricing tiers felt aggressive for what you get.
• Monday.com / Asana— Project management powerhouses, but they don’t do invoicing or real financial tracking.

Every option either did too much (and cost accordingly) or too little (and I’d still need supplementary tools). Nobody was building the “just right” ERP for a one-to-ten-person IT consultancy.

Building vlastERP

So I built it myself.

The backend is written in C++17. That might sound unusual for a web application, but it was a deliberate choice: sub-millisecond response times, no runtime overhead, and a single compiled binary that runs on minimal infrastructure. When your business model is a €9/month subscription, you need to keep server costs razor-thin.

The frontend is Next.js— server-side rendering, fast page loads, and a modern developer experience. The data layer uses a schema-per-tenant architecture in PostgreSQL, giving each customer complete data isolation without the operational complexity of separate databases.

Key design decisions that shaped the product:

• EU-first compliance— GDPR, GoBD (German tax-audit compliance), and reverse-charge VAT are built in, not bolted on. Because if you’re invoicing from the EU, these aren’t optional.
• 6 RBAC roles— From Owner to Viewer, with granular permissions. When you hire your first subcontractor, you shouldn’t have to give them access to your financial dashboard.
• Full audit trail— Every change to an invoice, time entry, or project is logged. This isn’t just good practice; it’s a legal requirement in several EU jurisdictions.
• Time → Invoice in one click— Select unbilled time entries, click “Generate Invoice,” and the line items, rates, and totals are populated automatically.

The Result

My monthly admin dropped from 6 hours to under 1 hour. That’s not a marketing claim — it’s my lived experience as the first user of the product.

Here’s what the workflow looks like now:

1. I track time as I work. The timer is always one click away.
2. At the end of the month, I open the invoicing view. Unbilled hours are already grouped by client and project.
3. I click “Generate Invoice.” Review. Send. Done.
4. The profitability dashboard updates automatically. I know exactly which clients are worth my time and which ones need a rate conversation.

No copying between tools. No spreadsheets. No reconciliation. Everything lives in one place, and the data flows naturally from tracking to billing to analysis.

Available Today

vlastERP is live and available to sign up for. The first 2 months are completely free— no credit card required. You get time tracking, invoicing, and basic project management at no cost while you evaluate the platform.

If you need profitability analytics, advanced RBAC, or support for your growing team, the paid plans start at €9/month.

I built this because I needed it. Now I want to know if you need it too.