Project Profitability

See at a glance which projects are making money and which are not. Track revenue, costs, margins, and effective hourly rates for every project in your company.

Overview Dashboard

The Project Profitability dashboard gives you a high-level view of financial performance across all your projects. Navigate to Reports → Project Profitability to access it.

The dashboard is organized into three areas:

Summary cards at the top showing aggregate figures
Project list in the center with sortable columns for each project
Detail panel that opens when you click on a specific project

Data is pulled from your time entries, invoices, and expense transactions to give you a complete picture of project economics.

Summary Cards Explained

The summary cards at the top of the dashboard display aggregate metrics across all projects (or filtered projects):

Card	What It Shows
Total Revenue	The sum of all invoiced and received amounts across your projects. This includes both paid and outstanding invoices linked to projects.
Total Costs	The sum of all labor costs (hours worked multiplied by cost rates) and direct expenses assigned to projects.
Gross Profit	Total Revenue minus Total Costs. This is the profit your projects have generated before overhead.
Avg. Margin	The average profit margin across all projects, expressed as a percentage. Calculated as (Gross Profit / Total Revenue) x 100.

Tip: If your average margin is below 30%, review your project pricing. Low margins often indicate that labor costs are higher than expected, scope creep has increased hours beyond the original estimate, or the billing rate is too low for the work involved.

Filtering Projects

The project list can be filtered to focus on specific subsets of your work:

Status: Filter by Active, Completed, or All projects
Customer: Show only projects for a specific customer
Date range: Limit results to projects started or completed within a date range
Profitability: Show only profitable projects, only unprofitable projects, or all

Filters apply to both the project list and the summary cards, so the totals update to reflect only the filtered results.

Project Detail View

Click on any project in the list to open its detail view. The detail view provides a complete financial breakdown for that single project:

Revenue breakdown: Each invoice or payment associated with the project, with amounts and dates
Cost breakdown: Labor costs by team member (hours and cost rates) and direct expenses
Time summary: Total hours logged, billable hours vs. non-billable hours
Margin analysis: Profit margin for this project specifically, with comparison to your company average
Budget tracking: If a budget was set, how much has been consumed (see Budget Usage below)

Understanding Effective Rate

The effective rate is one of the most important metrics for service businesses. It tells you how much revenue you actually earned per hour of work on a project.

Formula: Effective Rate = Total Project Revenue / Total Hours Worked

This differs from your billing rate because it accounts for:

Non-billable hours: Time spent on the project that was not invoiced (meetings, revisions, admin)
Fixed-price work: If you quoted a flat fee but the project took more hours than expected, the effective rate drops
Discounts: Any invoice discounts reduce the effective rate
Write-offs: Hours that were written off and not billed

Example: You invoiced a project for $10,000 and your team logged 120 total hours (100 billable + 20 non-billable):

Effective Rate = $10,000 / 120 = $83.33/hr

If your target billing rate is $125/hr, the effective rate of $83.33 tells you the project underperformed -- you captured only 67% of your target rate.

Tip: Track effective rate over time to spot trends. A declining effective rate across projects may indicate that scope is not being managed well, non-billable work is increasing, or project estimates need to be recalibrated.

Budget Usage Indicators

If a project has a budget (either hours or dollars), the profitability view shows how much of that budget has been consumed:

Indicator	Budget Used	Meaning
Green bar	0-70%	On track. Plenty of budget remaining for the work ahead.
Yellow bar	70-90%	Approaching limit. Monitor closely and assess remaining scope.
Red bar	90-100%+	At or over budget. Take action to prevent further overrun or negotiate additional budget with the client.

The budget bar shows both hours used and dollar amount consumed, so you can see which dimension is closer to the limit.

Creating Projects

Projects are created in the Time Tracking module and then appear automatically in Project Profitability once they have associated time entries or invoices.

To create a new project:

Navigate to Time Tracking from the sidebar
Click Manage Projects (or New Project)
Enter the project name, select the customer, and set an optional budget
Save the project
Start logging time entries against the project

As time entries accumulate and invoices are created for the project, all financial data flows into the Project Profitability dashboard automatically.

See the Time Tracking guide for detailed instructions on project setup and time entry.

Tip: Set a budget for every project, even if it is just an estimate. Having a budget baseline makes the profitability dashboard dramatically more useful because you can track consumption in real time rather than only reviewing profitability after the project is done.