Financial District design or engineering firm? Find out if your project software charges per seat or per firm, and which is cheaper at your size.

Three numbers

Write down three headcounts before you compare any price.

Per-seat and per-firm pricing only make sense next to your own numbers, so start with these:

1. People on the software invoice.
2. People who log time in it each week.
3. People who open a report, a budget, or an invoice in it each month.

If the first number is much bigger than the third, most of your seats are paying for a timesheet. That is the gap the audit prices out: what the time-only seats cost, and what a tool sized to them would cost instead. A firm-owned time tool might look like our time and budget demo (fake data, not a client).

The neighborhood

The Financial District in the city's numbers, and how they overlap our other pages.

The city's analysis neighborhoods have no neighborhood called just "Financial District." The closest is "Financial District/South Beach," which also runs south of Market Street. Pulled 2026-09-29 from the city's Registered Business Locations data, 457 active locations in that area report one of seven codes: 192 engineering, 116 architecture, 12 landscape architecture, 36 interior design, 27 graphic design, 36 advertising, and 38 PR (exact query). These are registered locations, not people or firm sizes, and the codes are self-reported.

That area overlaps our other pages, so here is the overlap. By benefit district, the 457 split into Downtown 231, East Cut (Greater Rincon Hill) 59, Union Square Business Improvement District 52, Yerba Buena 34, and 81 in no district (query). The 52 are the same locations counted on our Union Square page. Another 12, all in no district, sit inside the search box on our Jackson Square page (query). That leaves 393 that appear on no other page of ours. Our SoMa page counts the city's "South of Market" neighborhood, so none of its 114 are in these 457, but the city puts some Second Street and Third Street addresses here, not in SoMa.

For scale, the area has 14,377 active locations in all (query). The largest coded groups are offices of lawyers (670), lessors of nonresidential buildings (497), software publishers (303), other professional services (246), and custom computer programming (232), and 3,389 have no code (query). Separately, Wikipedia says the Financial District "is home to the city's largest concentration of corporate headquarters, law firms, insurance companies, real estate firms, savings and loan banks, and other financial institutions." On the area around the Transbay Transit Center, south of Market, it says: "This area is sometimes called the South Financial District by real estate developers, or simply included as part of the Financial District itself" (Wikipedia, checked 2026-09-29).

The city is also trying to change what some of these office buildings are used for. On June 12, 2025, it announced that the mayor "signed legislation to foster a vibrant 24/7 neighborhood downtown, creating a downtown revitalization financing district to support the conversion of vacant and underutilized offices and commercial buildings into much-needed housing." It said the district "would cover core downtown office and commercial areas including the Market Street corridor from the waterfront to Civic Center, the Financial District, Union Square, and the East Cut, Rincon, and Yerba Buena neighborhoods south of Market," and that "Preliminary analysis estimates approximately 1,200 properties in the proposed district would be eligible for the program" (sf.gov, checked 2026-09-29). Program details can change after an announcement, so check current rules with the city.