See If a Project Actually Made Money

That gorgeous logo redesign that wrapped on time and made the client cry happy tears? It only counts as a win if it actually made money. Fee-Lion pulls your billed time and your project expenses into one margin view, so you can see what you really cleared before you quote the next one at the same price.

What margin actually measures

Margin is simply what’s left after the work paid for itself. Two numbers feed it inside a project: what came in (the invoices you billed against it, including billed time) and what went out (the expenses you attributed to it). Fee-Lion does the subtraction for you.

• Revenue — invoices tied to the project, including any tracked time you billed.
• Costs — expenses attributed to the project: software, subcontractors, stock assets, that emergency font license.
• Margin — revenue minus costs, shown as a dollar figure and a percentage.

The trick is that both sides have to be fed honestly. A project looks wildly profitable if you forgot to log the freelancer you hired, and looks like a loss if you never billed the hours you tracked.

Feed both sides of the ledger

Before the margin number means anything, make sure the work and the costs are actually attached to the project.

1. Open the project from the Projects sidebar item.
2. Log your hours against it. Use Time (or the built-in timer) so every session lands on the right project.
3. Bill that time to an invoice so it counts as revenue, not just hours sitting in a log.
4. Record your costs under Expenses and attribute each one to this project.
5. Come back to the project’s margin view and read the spread.

Tip: Unbilled time is the silent margin killer. Tracked hours don’t add a cent to a project until you bill them to an invoice — so before you judge a project, check the time log and clear out anything you meant to invoice.

Read the number, then act on it

A healthy margin tells you your rate holds up. A thin one is a flag worth chasing down.

If the margin came in low

• Check the hours. Did the project soak up twice the time you scoped? That’s a rate-and-scope conversation for next time.
• Check the expenses. A subcontractor or license you ate quietly can flip a winner into a wash.
• Check what’s still unbilled. Sometimes the project really was profitable; you just haven’t invoiced all of it yet.

If the margin came in strong

Bank the lesson. You now have a real number for how this kind of work performs, which is exactly what you want in hand when the next similar request hits your inbox. Quote from evidence, not from a hopeful guess.

Zoom out across every project

One project tells you a story; all of them tell you a pattern. When you want the bigger picture — which clients are worth more of your week and which ones quietly cost you — head to Reports. The ops dashboard and revenue drill-down let you compare performance across projects and clients, and you can export the whole thing to CSV or PDF for your own records or your accountant.

Make this a habit at the end of each project, not just at tax time. Five minutes reading a margin is the cheapest pricing research you’ll ever do.

What’s next

• Attribute an expense to a project
• Bill tracked time to an invoice
• Drill down your revenue
• Read the ops dashboard