Costline is made by Qelo — a South African software studio building focused tools for businesses that need to trust their own numbers.
Most operations only find out what a season cost once it’s over — from a spreadsheet that’s been overwritten so many times the history is gone. Update one rate and last year’s totals quietly move with it. The number you trusted yesterday isn’t there today.
Costline was built to fix exactly that. Every log stores the rate that applied on its own work date, a rate change is a new dated version rather than an overwrite, and reports are read from the amounts already stored — never re-priced at today’s rates. It’s activity-based costing with a memory.
That’s a narrow, stubborn promise, and keeping it well is the entire job. We’d rather do that one thing properly than a dozen things loosely.
When a shortcut would let history be quietly rewritten, we don't take it. The whole product is built around a promise that past costs stay true — so we hold that line even when it's more work.
Farms, sites and workshops are all different, so the structure is yours to name — cost centres, rates, activities, materials. We keep the arithmetic and the history honest; you keep the shape of your work.
We onboard every operation ourselves rather than dropping you into an empty account. It means fewer, better-fitted customers — and software that earns its place in how you run.
Qelo is a South African software studio building a small portfolio of focused business tools. Costline is our costing product — the one for operations that live or die on knowing what their work actually costs.
We’re deliberately small. It means the people who build the product are the people who set you up and answer the phone — and that the person on the other end of a hard question actually knows the answer.
Whether you’re sizing up costing for the first time or moving off a spreadsheet you’ve outgrown, we’re glad to talk it through — no pressure, no bot.
Or email hello@costline.co.za