See your margin

Margin answers one question: did the work you delivered make anything? It prices approved time at your billable rates, subtracts what it cost you, adds approved expenses, and shows the result per currency.

Caution

Margin exposes cost and billable rates, which is compensation-adjacent data. It is limited to Portfolio Managers and above, and to people who can already see project budgets. That is the same boundary rate cards use.

Approved only, on both halves

The report counts approved time and approved expense, nothing else. Drafts and pending rows are excluded.

That is a deliberate choice and worth understanding, because it explains a figure that does not move. A margin number that changed every time somebody saved a half-finished timesheet would be unusable for anything: you could never tell a real swing from someone typing. Approved rows are facts; everything else is a claim.

So if today’s work is not in the number yet, it is almost certainly waiting on an approval rather than missing.

Per currency, never combined

Every figure is shown per currency and none of them are added together. A firm billing in pounds and euros sees two lines.

Adding them would produce a number that moves with the exchange rate rather than with the business, and on a summary figure nobody reads the asterisk.

Why it moved

The report compares the period you chose against the one immediately before it and splits the change three ways:

• Volume: you did more or less work.
• Rate: the same work was priced differently.
• Expense: costs you absorbed or rebilled.

The three parts add up to the total change exactly.

Note

With no hours in the earlier period, new work reads as pure volume. That is correct: work that has just started has no earlier rate to have moved from, and reporting it as a rate change would tell you your pricing shifted when all that happened is that a project began.

What this is built from

Under the figures is the arithmetic’s source: approved hours, how many timesheet entries, how many approved expenses, and the rate basis.

The rate basis is the one to read when a margin looks wrong. It counts how each hour was priced:

• explicit: a billable rate was set on the rate card;
• markup: a percentage on top of cost;
• at cost: no billable rate configured, so the hour earns exactly what it costs.

Tip

If margin reads zero everywhere, check the rate basis before you check the work. All hours on “at cost” means nobody has configured a billable rate, which is a setup gap, not a business result. The two look identical in the margin figure alone, which is why the report shows you which it is. See Split cost and billable rates.

Where the margin is

The bottom table cuts the same money three ways, worst margin first:

• By project: which engagements are earning and which are not.
• By client: which relationships are worth having.
• By person: which is about utilisation and pricing, not performance.

Expenses are deliberately left out of the by-person cut. Charging a flight to the consultant who booked it would make that view read as a judgement of who travels, which is not what it measures.

You can export to CSV from here.

Note

A client is matched by identity, not by name. Two of your clients can legitimately share a name, and before this was linked properly their money would have been added into a single row that looked entirely correct. If an older project shows under a client label rather than a linked client, an administrator can attach it. New projects created from won deals are linked automatically.

A margin of zero on a real client

Three different things produce a zero, and the report distinguishes them:

What you see	What it means
”No approved time or expense”	Nothing has been approved for this period yet.
Real hours, margin 0, rate basis all at cost	No billable rate is configured.
Real hours, margin 0, rate basis explicit	You genuinely broke even.