Project Profitability
Per-project P&L: revenue, cost, margin, and effective hourly rate for every job. Stops you from re-bidding the next project at the same rate that just lost money on this one.
The Dashboard
Open Reports → Project Profitability for a portfolio view of how every project is performing financially.
The page is structured around three zones:
- Summary cards — aggregate totals at the top
- Project list — sortable rows, one per project
- Detail panel — opens when you click into a specific project
The numbers come from your time entries, invoices, and project-tagged expenses — Kantivo doesn't ask you to enter anything twice.
Summary Cards
The cards across the top roll up all projects in view (or the currently filtered subset):
| Card | Calculation |
|---|---|
| Total revenue | Sum of invoiced amounts linked to projects (paid and outstanding combined) |
| Total costs | Labor (hours × cost rate) plus direct project expenses |
| Gross profit | Revenue − Costs |
| Average margin | (Gross Profit ÷ Revenue) × 100, averaged across projects |
Filtering
- Status — Active, Completed, or All
- Customer — narrow to one client
- Date range — projects started/completed in a window
- Profitability — show only profitable, only unprofitable, or everything
Filters affect both the list and the summary cards, so the totals reflect only what's currently in view.
Project Detail
Clicking a project row opens its full breakdown:
- Revenue lines — every invoice and payment tied to the project, with amounts and dates
- Cost lines — labor cost by team member (hours × cost rate) plus direct expenses
- Time summary — total hours, billable vs. non-billable split
- Margin — this project's margin, compared against your company average
- Budget tracking — if a budget was set, how much has been used (see below)
Effective Rate
The single most useful metric for a service business: what you actually earned per hour of effort.
Formula: Effective rate = Project revenue ÷ Total hours worked
It diverges from your nominal billing rate because real work involves:
- Non-billable hours — meetings, revisions, internal coordination
- Fixed-price overruns — quote was flat, project took longer than estimated
- Invoice discounts
- Write-offs — hours that didn't make it onto an invoice
Worked example: $10,000 invoiced project, 120 total hours logged (100 billable, 20 non-billable):
Effective rate = $10,000 ÷ 120 = $83.33/hr
If your target rate is $125/hr, you captured 67% of it. That gap is where margin disappears.
Budget Usage
For projects with a budget (hours or dollars), the dashboard shows a usage bar:
| Color | Used | Read it as |
|---|---|---|
| Green | 0–70% | On track |
| Yellow | 70–90% | Watch — start assessing remaining scope |
| Red | 90%+ | Act — overrun imminent or already happening |
Kantivo shows both hours used and dollars consumed so you can see which dimension is hitting the wall first.
Creating Projects
Projects originate in the Time Tracking module and start showing up in Project Profitability as soon as they have time entries or invoices.
- Open Time Tracking
- Click Manage Projects (or New Project)
- Enter the name, link a customer, optionally set a budget
- Save
- Start logging time and invoicing against it
All revenue and cost data flows into the profitability dashboard automatically as it accrues. See the Time Tracking guide for the full project-setup walkthrough.