Project profitability and project accounting software
CrmLeaf shows what each project earns against what it costs: invoiced revenue, labour from timesheets, expenses and a budget to measure them against. It is a professional services automation (PSA) platform, so the data comes from the work your team already logs, from $9/user/month.
- Free trial
- No credit card
- Budget Management is an add-on
- What it answers
- is this project making money, and will it still be by the end?
- Inputs
- project invoices, approved timelogs, expenses, purchase orders and bills, and a project budget.
- Outputs
- budget vs actual, usage %, variance, burn rate, margin, earned value, and an over-budget leaderboard.
- Alerts
- warning thresholds per budget or line, checked daily, sent to the budget creator and project administrator.
- Plan fit
- time, expenses, invoices and projects are core; Budget Management is an add-on module enabled per company.
- Not included
- a general ledger or statutory accounting. Pair it with your accounting package.
The formula
How do you track project profitability?
Profitability needs four numbers per project, kept in one place and refreshed as work happens. Most teams get them from four different tools, which is why the answer is usually a month late.
Revenue
What you billed or will bill: fixed fee, milestones or time-and-materials, taken from project invoices.
Labour cost
Approved hours from timesheets, priced at your internal cost rate. Hours are the largest cost on most service projects.
Expenses
Project expenses, plus purchase orders and bills for contractors and pass-through costs.
Budget
The plan: planned cost by line, category or phase. Without it you can see profit but not whether it is on track.
Where the data comes from
What data do you need for project accounting?
With Budget Management enabled, actuals are never typed in or stored. They are rolled up live from the project's own records each time you open the screen, so the budget cannot disagree with the project.
Timelogs and timesheets. The live timer and weekly timesheets record hours against project and task, with manager approval. Time pulls straight into invoices.
Expenses. Costs logged on the project, billable or not, count toward actuals.
Purchase orders and bills. Commitments are tracked too, so variance is shown with and without money already committed.
Invoices. Revenue side of the margin. Milestones are invoiceable.
Uncategorised. Any cost that no budget line claims lands in an Uncategorised row, so totals always reconcile with the operational screens.
Honest scope
- Budget Management is an add-on, off by default until an administrator enables it.
- One primary budget per project; approving locks the amounts, and changes go through a revision.
- A figure that cannot be computed yet shows N/A, not a misleading zero.
- Core plans still give you timelogs, expenses, invoices and the Work Summary report.
Planned vs actual
How do you compare project budget vs actual?
The budget dashboard has a KPI header, a per-line planned-versus-actual table, an earned value panel, a category breakdown and burn-down charts. The same figures feed three reports: Budget vs Actual, Project Cost Summary and Over-budget, each exportable to CSV and PDF.
Usage and variance
Usage % shows how much of the plan is consumed. Variance is reported with and without commitments.
Burn rate
Rate of consumption, with a projected exhaustion date: when the budget runs out if nothing changes.
Margin and categories
Margin plus a category breakdown show where money goes. The leaderboard ranks over-budget projects.
Earned value
EV, PV, CV, SV, CPI, SPI, EAC, ETC and VAC compare work completed to both plan and spend.
Worked example
What does a profitability calculation look like?
Illustrative numbers only, not customer data. A fixed-fee brand project invoiced at $24,000.
| Line | Planned | Actual | Variance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue (invoiced) | $24,000 | $24,000 | $0 |
| Labour (hours × $50 cost rate) | 200 h = $10,000 | 220 h = $11,000 | +$1,000 |
| Expenses (contractor, tools) | $2,000 | $2,500 | +$500 |
| Total cost | $12,000 | $13,500 | +$1,500 (12.5% over) |
| Profit | $12,000 | $10,500 | −$1,500 |
| Margin | 50.0% | 43.8% | −6.2 pts |
The project still makes money, but 10% extra hours and a small expense overrun cost 6 margin points. A warning threshold set at, say, 80% of planned labour would have flagged it before the final week.
Early warning
How do you catch a project going over budget early?
Set a warning threshold on a budget or on individual lines. A daily snapshot job records burn-down and trend history and fires a threshold notification to the budget creator and the project administrator when the budget, or any line, crosses its warning line. Notifications go out by email through your company's own configuration.
Budgets also follow an approval lifecycle: draft, pending approval, approved, closed. Approvers are notified on submit, approval locks the amounts, and a revision creates a new version while the approved one stays on record.
Built in
- Per-budget and per-line warning thresholds
- Daily snapshots for burn-down and trend charts
- Approval request notification to approvers
- Six ownership-scoped budget permissions
- Templates seeded for construction, solar, project management and generic budgets
Spreadsheets vs CrmLeaf
Why not track project costs in a spreadsheet?
| Question | Spreadsheet | CrmLeaf with Budget Management |
|---|---|---|
| Where do actuals come from? | Exported and pasted from time, expense and invoice tools | Derived live from timelogs, expenses, POs, bills and invoices |
| How current is it? | As of the last paste | Current each time the screen opens |
| Overrun warnings | Someone has to look | Threshold notifications from a daily job |
| Earned value and burn rate | Built and maintained by hand | EV/PV/CV/SV/CPI/SPI/EAC/ETC/VAC, burn rate, projected exhaustion |
| Approval and audit trail | Version copies by email | Approval lifecycle, locked amounts, revisions kept on record |
| Portfolio view | Merge one file per project | Three reports with CSV and PDF export |
| Cost | Free, plus staff time | From $9/user/month; Budget Management is an add-on |
For agencies and services firms
How do you measure agency profitability?
Agency profitability is project profitability summed across clients. Because projects, timelogs, expenses and invoices live in the same system, the portfolio reports show which projects and categories pull margin down, and the Work Summary report rolls billable time up from employee to client to task. Pair it with resource management to see whether the hours were planned or leaked.
FAQ
Common questions about project profitability in CrmLeaf
Project profit is revenue minus labour cost minus expenses. Divide by revenue for margin percentage. In CrmLeaf the revenue comes from project invoices, labour from approved timesheet entries, and costs from project expenses, purchase orders and bills.
Related
Explore further
See where each project really lands
Start a free trial, log time against a project and compare it to a budget. We will show you how to enable Budget Management.