Project profit margin
The share of a project's fee left after every real cost of delivering it: your hours, subcontractors, tools, and the unbilled rework.
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What it is
Project profit margin is revenue minus the true cost of delivering that project, expressed as a percentage of revenue. The word doing all the work is 'true'. Subcontractor invoices and stock licences are easy to count. The costs that actually eat the margin are your own hours at their fully loaded cost (your pay plus tax, software, insurance, and the overhead that keeps the business open, divided by billable hours), the unbilled rework, and the three-week email tail after launch. Keep the other thing, the two proposals you did not write because this project ran long, in a separate column labelled opportunity cost. It is real and it should influence what you take on next, but folding it into project cost double-counts against the hourly cost rate you already charged in.
Calculate it per project, not per month, and only after the final invoice clears. Fee 12,000, subcontractor 3,000, tools and assets 400, your 90 tracked hours at an internal cost rate of 60 gives 5,400, so cost is 8,800 and margin is 26.7 percent. Compare that number across projects and patterns fall out fast: certain client types, certain deliverables, and certain payment structures reliably run thin. That is a pricing signal, not a personal failing.
The misconception is that a big fee means a good project. A 25,000 project at 15 percent margin is worse business than an 8,000 project at 55 percent, and it also blocked your calendar for a quarter. Margin and effective hourly rate are the pair worth tracking. Fee alone is a vanity number.
Ask AI for it
Build a per-project profitability tracker as a spreadsheet schema plus the formulas. Columns: project name, client, contract fee, expenses actually incurred (subcontractors, stock assets, software, travel), tracked delivery hours, tracked admin and communication hours, my fully loaded internal cost rate per hour, total cost, gross profit, profit margin percent, effective hourly rate, and calendar days from kickoff to final payment. Give me the exact formulas for total cost, margin percent, and effective hourly rate. Add a summary sheet that ranks projects by margin, groups them by client and by project type, and flags any project below a 40 percent margin or below a target effective hourly rate. Include a short note on which hours people forget to log (scope negotiation, feedback consolidation, post-launch support) and add rows for them. Keep opportunity cost, the work I turned away or never pitched while this ran, in its own clearly separate column that does not feed the cost or margin formulas.