Tarly.

Tarly is the software ScaleWise VA runs on. Time tracking, tasks, invoicing, client records, a knowledge base and team monitoring, in one place, built by me for a team that was drowning in four tools that did not talk to each other.

Why it exists

We were running time tracking in one product, tasks in another, invoicing in a third, and process documentation in a shared drive nobody opened. Every one of them was decent. The cost was not any single tool, it was that the numbers never agreed and somebody spent hours a month reconciling them by hand.

The specific thing that pushed it over was invoicing. Hours lived in one system and invoices in another, so producing a client invoice meant exporting, filtering, and trusting that whoever did the export had picked the right date range. That is a job that should not exist.

What it does

• Time. Timers, Monday-start weeks, and earnings calculated per member against their own pay model.
• Tasks. A board with subtasks, comments and mentions, scoped per client.
• Invoices. Line items built from tracked time, so the hours on the invoice are the hours in the system by construction rather than by somebody being careful.
• Knowledge base. Categories, per-document access, required reading and read receipts. The last one matters more than it sounds when a process changes and you need to know who has actually seen it.
• Monitoring. Time, activity and screenshots in one view, driven by each member's own settings.
• Reports. Several views, filters and CSV export, because someone always needs it in a spreadsheet.

It notifies through Slack rather than email, has a public API for the teams that want their own reporting on top, and runs on Cloudflare Workers, which is why it loads the way it does.

What I learned building it

Two things worth saying out loud.

Monitoring is a trust problem before it is a technical one. Screenshot tooling built without the team's consent gets worked around within a week, and then you have surveillance that does not even produce accurate data. Every capture in Tarly is driven by flags on the member's own record and the client asks before it starts. Teams accepted it because of that, not despite it.

The other is that the reconciliation work I was trying to remove was never really about the tools. It was about two systems each holding a version of the truth. Merging them did not save time by being faster; it saved time by making the disagreement impossible.

Can you use it

Not yet, honestly. Tarly is internal software that runs one agency well and has not been through anything that would make it safe to hand to a stranger: no billing, no onboarding, and a set of assumptions baked in that are true for us and probably not for you.

If you run an agency with the same problem and want to compare notes on how you solved it, or you want to know whether it is worth building rather than buying, that is a conversation I enjoy having. Email hello@scalewiseva.com. I wrote about the decision to build it here.