Find your most profitable client

The client who pays you the most isn’t always the one who earns you the most. Once you factor in the hours and expenses each engagement soaks up, the leaderboard can flip. Fee-Lion already has the numbers to settle it — you just need to read revenue and margin side by side.

Start with the revenue drilldown

Open Reports from the left sidebar and choose the Revenue view. This ranks where your money actually came from, so you can see who’s billing big before you ask who’s keeping you in the black.

1. Go to Reports in the sidebar and open the Revenue drilldown.
2. Set the date range to a meaningful window — a full quarter or year tells a truer story than a single invoice.
3. Group or sort by client so each company rolls up its total billings.
4. Jot down your top three or four by revenue. These are your candidates, not your winners yet.

Revenue answers “who pays the most.” It doesn’t answer “who’s worth the most.” For that, you need to subtract what each client cost you to serve.

Tip: A high revenue total with a low approval-to-invoice ratio can mean a client who haggles every estimate. Cross-check the Win/Loss report to spot clients who burn estimating time before they ever pay.

Layer in project margin

Profit lives in your Projects. When you attribute expenses to a project and bill tracked time against it, Fee-Lion calculates margin — what’s left after the costs of doing the work. That’s the number that names your real best client.

1. Open Projects from the sidebar and pick a project tied to one of your top-revenue clients.
2. Confirm its expenses are attributed to the project so costs are captured, not floating loose.
3. Check that billable time has been tracked and billed to the project’s invoices.
4. Read the project’s margin — revenue minus expenses — and note it next to that client’s billings.

Do this for each top client and a pattern appears fast. The studio that paid you $12k but ran lean on hours and materials can quietly out-earn the one that paid $20k but ate every evening and a pile of stock costs.

What can quietly erode margin

• Unbilled time — hours tracked but never pulled onto an invoice are pure leakage.
• Un-rebilled expenses — costs you absorbed instead of passing through to the client.
• Scope creep — extra rounds that never made it into a revised estimate.

Turn the answer into a habit

Once you know your most profitable client, lean into the relationship and protect the rhythm that makes it work.

• Tag that client’s invoices so you can isolate their numbers in future reports — open an invoice and apply a tag for clean filtering.
• Use the same estimate template and deposit defaults that made the engagement healthy. You’ll find these under Settings → Preferences.
• Export your revenue and margin findings to CSV or PDF so you can revisit them next quarter and watch the ranking shift.

Tip: Press ⌘K and type a client’s name to jump straight to their record, then to their projects — a fast way to spot-check margin without clicking through the whole sidebar.

Let the numbers do the naming. When you rank by profit instead of billings, you stop chasing the loudest client and start protecting the most valuable one.

What’s next

• Track project profitability and margin
• Drill down your revenue
• Tag invoices for reporting
• Export reports to CSV and PDF