Costs and margins

Margins are only as honest as the costs behind them. Business → Costs holds two things: your business's operating costs and the cost rates for you and your team — and both are effective-dated, which is the detail that makes the numbers trustworthy.

Operating costs

Record what it costs to run the business — software, insurance, workspace, accountancy — as cost lines with amounts and dates. Together with supplier bills, this is your overhead: the number your billable work has to clear before anything is profit.

Cost rates

Your cost rate is what an hour of your time costs the business (not what you charge — that's the project's rates). Team members each get their own cost lines, and per-person rates are what turn logged hours into real project costs.

Effective dating — why it matters

Every cost and rate has an effective from date (and optionally an end date). When your rate changes in June:

• Work logged in May is still costed at May's rate.
• Work logged in July uses the new one.
• A March project's margin doesn't silently rewrite itself when you update today's numbers.

This is why you edit by adding a new dated line, not by overwriting the old one — the history is the point.

Where the numbers surface

• Project margins — hours × the cost rate in force when the hours were logged, plus expenses and assigned bills, against what you billed.
• Non-billable projects — cost view only: what the work consumed, in hours and pounds. With no client attached it's internal overhead; with a client attached (pro-bono work) you choose per project whether the cost shows as a loss against that client in the client list and reports, or stays in overhead.
• Business → Overview and Reports — the whole picture: revenue, delivery cost, overhead.

Note: costs and margins are sensitive numbers — this area is admin-only, and team members never see each other's rates.