See what agents cost

When agents do part of the work on a project, two questions follow: what did that work cost, and how much of it was there? Onplana answers them in two places, and keeps both apart from your people.

• Margin counts what hosted agents cost, as a cost on the projects they worked on.
• The Capacity Planner shows how much agent work there was, in agent-days and in the tasks and projects the agents touched.

Neither ever adds agents to your team’s hours, utilisation or headcount. An agent-day is not a person’s day.

Agent cost on the margin report

On the margin report, agent cost is a third kind of cost beside approved time and expenses. It lowers the margin of the project the agent worked on, of that project’s client, and of the firm. It never appears under Person, and agent work earns no revenue in this report.

What counts: stated cost from hosted agents

A figure is counted only when the agent ran as a hosted agent and your AI provider stated what the session cost. That is what your provider charges your own provider account. Onplana records the amount; it does not estimate one.

What that leaves out:

• Agents you run on your own machine. Onplana never sees what they spend, so they carry no cost here.
• Hosted sessions whose provider stated no cost. The report counts them and tells you how many, but adds nothing for them.
• The agent-days Onplana charges for running hosted agents. Those are on your Onplana bill, not in the margin report.

The cost lands on the day your provider reported it, so a report window includes only the cost that accrued inside it. It belongs to the project the agent’s task was in when the cost was recorded, and stays there if the task moves later.

Providers state cost in US dollars. Onplana converts it into the project’s currency using the exchange rate captured when the cost was recorded, or your organization’s current rates if there is none. When neither can convert it, the cost stays in a US dollar row rather than being netted at a guessed rate.

The Agent cost card

When agents were active in the period, an Agent cost card sits above the grouped rows and says what the figures include:

• how many hosted sessions stated a cost, and so are counted
• how many hosted sessions stated no cost, and so are not
• any cost with no project to charge it to (its task was gone when the cost was recorded, or its project has since been deleted), which is in the totals only
• any cost that could not be converted into its project’s currency

The Agent grouping

Under Where the margin is, choose Agent to see one row per agent. The option appears only when an agent had a stated cost or logged approved time in the period.

Column	What it shows
Agent	The agent, one row per provider. Cost whose agent connection has since been removed is grouped as Removed agent connection.
Hours	Approved time the agent logged, if it logs time. Agents’ hours are never counted in your team’s hours.
Result	The cost its provider stated, for example $20.00 stated cost, or No stated cost for an agent that logged time but has no stated cost.

An agent that runs on your own machine can still appear here if it logged approved time. It shows its hours and No stated cost.

Under Project, a project that had agent cost says how much of its cost that was, for example “$20.00 of the cost was hosted agents”. Why it moved, which compares with the same length of time just before, adds an Agents bar when agent cost changed the margin.

Not in your accounting export

Agent cost is never sent to your accounting export. The export carries lines you bill or book against a client, and how you book what your AI provider charged you is your decision, so none of it appears there as a line. It stays in the margin report only.

Agent work in the Capacity Planner

Select Timesheet in the sidebar, switch to the Capacity Planner tab, and choose Weekly or Monthly. When any agent worked in that week or month, an Agents card appears below the team table. The Forecast view does not show it.

Note

The Capacity Planner needs the Professional plan or above, and is shown to Owners, Admins and Portfolio Managers. See Plan team capacity.

Column	Hosted agent	Agent on your own machine
Runs on	Hosted	Your machine
Agent-days	The agent-days it used in the period	Cost unknown to Onplana
Tasks	Tasks its sessions worked on	Tasks it changed or had claimed
Projects	Projects its sessions worked on	Projects it changed something in or had a task claimed in

When hosted agents were active, the card’s header also shows Agent-days used in the period and Agent-days left, what you can still run.

An agent on your own machine is shown as activity only. It is counted from what it changed in the period, plus any task it had claimed during it. Cost unknown to Onplana means exactly that: an empty cost column is not a free agent.

The in-app Onplana Agent is not listed here. Its usage comes out of your organization’s AI tokens.

Caution

Agents are never counted in your team’s hours, utilisation or capacity. The team table above the card is people only, so an agent cannot make the team look bigger than it is.

The Agent cost column in the CSV

Export CSV on the margin report writes the grouping you are looking at. In the Project grouping, when any project had agent cost, the file gains an Agent cost column: the part of that row’s cost that was hosted agents, in the row’s currency, and 0 for a currency with none. It is added as the last column, so a spreadsheet built on the older file keeps its column positions.

Exporting the Agent grouping gives one row per agent and currency: its hours, its cost, a revenue of 0, and a negative margin equal to the cost. The margin percentage is left empty, because there is no revenue to take a percentage of. An agent with no stated cost gets one row with its hours and the money columns empty. Negative figures are written as numbers, so the column sums.