Get project profitability out of Excel — see cost and margin per project as time gets logged
A services or agency business that logs hours and expenses in Excel usually cannot answer “is this project actually profitable” without someone spending a day reconciling spreadsheets at month end. A real time-and-expense ledger, tied to both a cost rate and a bill rate per person, gives you that answer as time gets logged, not a month later.
Why spreadsheet time tracking hides project margin
A spreadsheet of logged hours does not know the difference between what a person costs you and what you bill the client for their time — someone has to apply those rates by hand, per project, usually only when someone asks. By the time you find out a project ran over cost, the work is already done.
Expenses tracked in a separate document make it worse: nothing ties an expense back to the project it belongs to automatically, so the true cost of a project is scattered across multiple files that have to be reconciled by hand.
Log time and expenses against a real cost/bill rate model
d-bye’s project-cost template models projects, team members (with both a cost rate and a bill rate), customers, and tasks as master data, and logs every hour and every expense as a ledger entry tied to a specific project.
Because cost and bill rates live on the member record, actual cost and gross margin project automatically from logged time — you are not reconstructing them from a spreadsheet after the fact.
See project margin as work happens, not at month end
The project dashboard and list/CRUD screens for projects, time entries, expenses, and invoices give you a running view of where a project actually stands, instead of a monthly fire drill. A monthly aggregation batch and P&L / invoice PDFs build on this same ledger as a next step.
Try it before you build anything
The template previews with sample projects, members, and logged time already in place. It is faster to see the cost/bill rate model working first, then adjust the rates and fields to match how your own business actually bills.
See it for yourself
Preview this exact template and generate working code from it.