Set budget and labour rate
In project Edit…, choose the currency, Budget and Hourly rate, then Save. Add task estimates for planned labour. Social and advertising components may also carry planned budgets. Budget is a cost ceiling; it is not revenue and is not automatically the project’s sale price.
Record actual spending and income
In Finance → Expenses, choose Add Expense. Enter the date, amount, category and vendor; link a component when the spend belongs to one. Choose Purpose to distinguish Creation, Promotion, Support or Improvement; old entries remain Unclassified until you deliberately classify them. In Payments, choose Add Payment to record received revenue. Enter income, not a pre-calculated profit. When an invoice is paid, edit its Kind to Paid instead of adding the same receipt twice. These are manual records, not bank transactions.
Attribute money to a stage or task
Expense and Payment editors include Stage attribution and Task attribution. Selecting a task fills its current stage; you can retain an explicit stage attribution even if that task later moves. Alternatively open a stage detail or Task Inspector → Finance → Expenses, income & profit…; Add Expense and Add Income preselect that scope. Leave both attribution fields empty for project-level money. A component-linked expense may still roll up to that component’s stage.
Read and export scoped performance
In the project Finance tab, find Creation, promotion, support & financial attribution. Purpose rows show expenses only; they do not allocate labour or revenue by purpose. Stage rows include expenses, received income and task-linked labour. Click a row for its underlying ledger and editors. Task totals include only the selected task, not subtasks. Project-only / removed stage keeps unassigned or no-longer-visible work represented. Export allocation CSV contains project, stage, task and purpose rows in exact integer cents. These levels overlap: never add all rows into one total.
Read actuals and profitability
Labour actual = total logged minutes × the project’s current hourly rate ÷ 60. Actual cost = labour actual + expenses. Revenue received includes Paid and Deposit payments; Invoice Sent records are excluded until recorded as received. Profit = revenue received − actual cost. Margin = profit ÷ revenue received, shown only when revenue is positive. Effective hourly rate = revenue received ÷ logged hours.
Read planning and forecast figures
Planned cost adds estimated task labour and planned component budgets. Committed estimates remaining labour on each unfinished task plus unspent budgets on unfinished, non-cancelled components. Forecast = actual cost + committed. Remaining budget = budget − actual cost. Forecast variance = budget − forecast; a negative value indicates a forecast overrun.
Check the inputs when a number surprises you
Inspect Time for duplicate or misassigned entries, Expenses for component links, task estimates and completion statuses, and component budgets/statuses. Only task-linked time reduces that task’s estimated remaining effort. Keep component budgets for additional non-labour spend to avoid counting the same labour in both task estimates and component budgets.
See it in the app
Fictional demo data. Click an image to open the larger screenshot. Labels and dates may differ from your version.
