Project financials — revenue, costs, and profit

Available on the Business and Team plans.

Every project page answers the question that actually matters: is this job making money? Four stat cards do the arithmetic live, so you find out mid-job rather than at the end of the quarter.

Revenue

The sum of all invoices linked to the project, with a subtitle showing how much of it has actually been collected — the payments received against those invoices.

Those two numbers being different is the point. A project can be fully invoiced and still have brought in nothing, which is a completely different situation from one that is half-invoiced and paid on time. Billed tells you what you have earned; collected tells you what you have got.

Link invoices in the Invoices panel at the top of the project page — pick any existing invoice by number and it counts immediately. Unlinking removes it from the maths without touching the invoice itself. Invoices converted from a proposal that was linked to the project arrive already linked.

Total Cost

Two ingredients, shown separately in the subtitle:

  • Expenses — every expense linked to the project, added from the project's Expenses tab. Materials, subcontractors, permits, plant hire.
  • Labour — every hour on the Time tab, multiplied by its hourly rate.

Labour is the one people leave out, and it is usually the largest single cost on the job. A project that looks profitable on materials alone frequently is not once the hours are on it.

Profit and margin

Profit = Revenue − Total Cost, with the margin percentage beside it. Green is good; red means the job is underwater.

Margin is the more useful of the two once you have a few projects to compare. A $60,000 job at 8% and a $12,000 job at 34% look very different in the profit column and tell you the opposite of what that column suggests about which work to chase.

Budget

Your budget or contract value, for comparing against actuals. When change orders are approved, their total appears alongside the budget, so you can see how far the scope has moved from what you originally priced.

A job running over budget is not automatically a problem — if the overrun is all approved change orders, the extra scope is billable and the margin may be intact. Budget versus approved changes versus actual cost is the three-way comparison worth reading together.

Keeping the numbers honest

The financials are only ever as complete as what you link into them. Three habits make the difference:

  1. Link every invoice for the job the moment you raise it, not at the end
  2. Link expenses as you incur them — a receipt filed a fortnight later is a receipt that does not get linked
  3. Log time with real hourly rates, including your own

Do those consistently and the projects list stops being a job tracker and becomes a truthful profitability report across your whole book of work — which is the thing that changes what you quote next time.

A note on what is counted

Revenue here is based on invoices linked to this project, which is deliberately narrower than your business-wide revenue reporting. The analytics section counts cash across everything on the day it cleared, whether or not a project was involved. The two answering slightly different questions is intentional; they are not meant to reconcile line for line.