Plan availability: project profitability depends on your subscription (it is part of the project features). If the Profitability tab is missing from your projects, your plan may not include it — see Subscriptions & billing, or ask your workspace owner.
The Profitability tab on a project gives you the live P&L for that one project — every invoice billed, every bill, expense, and timesheet costed, and the resulting margin — without leaving the project page.
It's the day-to-day view a project lead uses to answer:
- "Are we making money on this job?"
- "Have we already burned the budget?"
- "What hours and bills haven't been billed yet?"
Use this tab alongside project budgets (the plan) and the across-projects profitability reports under Reports (the roll-up).
What the tab shows
The page is laid out top-to-bottom:
- Headline numbers — Revenue, Cost, Gross Margin (currency + %), against the budget if one is set.
- Revenue breakdown — by source:
- Time billed (from invoiced timesheet entries),
- Items / fixed-price billed (other invoice lines),
- Retainer applied,
- Credit notes (negative).
- Cost breakdown — by source:
- Time logged (billable + non-billable, at each person's cost rate),
- Bills tagged to the project,
- Expenses tagged to the project,
- Mileage tagged to the project,
- Direct journals tagged to the project.
- Pipeline — work that has cost but hasn't been billed yet (work in progress):
- Approved time not yet invoiced,
- Reimbursable expenses not yet on an invoice.
- Activity timeline — a chronological list of every document contributing to the numbers, with a link to each.
Every row links back to its source document.
Step by step
Open the profitability tab
From the project page, click Profitability. If the tab is missing, either your plan doesn't include profitability or the project has no activity yet.
Filter by date range
The toolbar has a date picker — the default is "Project to date." Switch to a specific month or quarter to see profitability for that window. Costs and revenue are matched on their document date, not on when they were logged.
Drill into a row
Click any headline number or breakdown line to open a filtered list of the source documents.
Compare to budget
If the project has a budget, each headline number shows the budget alongside actuals with a coloured variance indicator — green when healthy, amber when nearing the cost budget, red when over.
Common mistakes
- "The project shows no revenue but we've delivered work." Revenue here means billed. Until you raise an invoice for the project's time or fixed-price work, revenue stays at zero. Drafts don't count.
- "My cost looks too low." Costs only roll up if tagged to the project. Untagged bills, expenses, mileage, and timesheets sit in general overhead. Check recent documents for missing tags.
- "Time is logged but not showing as cost." Time only counts as cost once it's Approved. Draft and Submitted hours don't appear — approve outstanding entries first.
- "The Profitability tab is hidden." It depends on your plan and needs to be enabled for your organization. Ask your workspace owner or administrator.
- Wrong margin because cost rate and bill rate are mixed up. The bill rate is on invoice lines; the cost rate is per person on the project. They can legitimately differ.
Behaviour and rules
- Approved time only, by default. Work in progress includes only timesheet entries marked Approved (or all entries, if the project doesn't use approval). Draft and Submitted hours are not counted as cost yet.
- Cost rate vs bill rate. Time cost uses each person's cost rate on the project; revenue from time uses the bill rate on the invoice line. The two are independent — see Timesheets.
- Invoiced ≠ paid. Revenue here means billed — the customer's payment status is not factored in. For cash collected vs billed, see the Cash Flow and A/R Aging reports.
- Tagged documents only. Bills, expenses, and journals are counted only when explicitly tagged to this project.
- Read-only. The Profitability tab is a computed view — nothing on this page writes to your accounts.
Related
- Projects & Finance — project setup, tagging, and rate configuration.
- Budgets — set the plan that the profitability tab compares actuals against.
- Timesheets — how time becomes both cost and revenue.
- Reports — across-projects profitability and timesheet reports.