Project Profitability / Margin Tracker

The problem this kills

You can feel when a project is bleeding money, but you can't prove it until the month closes — and by then it's too late to fix. Revenue lives in your billing system, labor cost lives in time tracking, expenses live in a spreadsheet someone forgot to update, and "target margin" lives in the founder's head. Nobody stitches them together until the quarter is over and the surprise has already happened.

So the conversations are always backward-looking: "Why did the Acme rebrand only clear 8%?" instead of "Acme is slipping below target right now — let's act this week."

This tool stitches the pieces together on demand, computes margin per project and per client, and flags the ones running under target — so the bad news arrives while you can still do something about it.

What you'll build

A private, login-only web app for your services or agency team that:

• Imports your revenue/billings and your cost roll-ups (labor + expenses + commitments) from CSV or a Google Sheet — no integration required to start.
• Computes margin per project and per client for a given period, handling fixed-fee and time-&-materials (T&M) projects differently because they earn money in completely different ways.
• Flags every project below its target margin, with a clear, sortable view of who's underwater and by how much.
• Routes the numbers through a human approval gate — a finance or delivery owner reviews the calculation and any adjustments and approves before it's shared or used in a decision.
• Exports a clean margin report as CSV in the exact columns your finance system or board deck expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

A complete, paste-and-go runbook written for a non-coder. You paste the whole thing into Claude Code and answer questions as it builds.

• It starts by interviewing you about your business — your billing model mix, how you roll up labor cost, what "target margin" means at your shop, your project/client naming, your typical and peak project counts, and your messy edge cases. The tool is then tailored to you, not stamped out from a generic template.
• A step-by-step build: data import, the margin math (fixed-fee vs T&M), the below-target flagging, the approval workflow, the email alerts, and the CSV export.
• Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt you paste into your AI agent.
• A "No API yet?" fallback so the whole thing is buildable today straight from spreadsheets.
• A verification checklist so you know it actually works before you trust a number.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

Financial data is exactly where "a clever spreadsheet" stops being good enough. This plan bakes in the controls from the start:

• Login so only your team can open it.
• Row-level security so people only ever see their own organization's data — and financials can be restricted to finance/leadership roles.
• A complete audit trail: who imported what, who adjusted a number, who approved the report, and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate: the tool drafts the margin report, a finance or delivery owner reviews it and any adjustments, and only an approved report can be shared or exported for decisions.
• Duplicate guards so the same project's numbers for a period can't be imported twice and silently double-counted.

Who it's for

Services and agency owners, delivery directors, finance partners, and account leads — anyone who is accountable for whether the work actually makes money and is tired of finding out a month late.

You've got this. Open the plan, paste the first prompt, and let the agent interview you.