You're Busy. But Are You Actually Making Money on That Project?
The Invoice That Changed Everything
Sarah ran a mid-sized graphic design studio in Melbourne. Eight staff, a solid client list, and a pipeline that looked healthy on paper. In March, her team wrapped up what had seemed like a landmark project — a full brand identity package for a national retail chain. Six weeks of work. A $42,000 invoice. Champagne was briefly considered.
Then her bookkeeper sent through the reconciled numbers.
Timesheets: 340 hours across five designers and a project manager. At loaded labour rates, that was $38,200 in staff costs alone. Add $4,100 in contractor fees for a motion graphics specialist they'd brought in mid-project, plus $800 in software licences and stock assets. Total cost: $43,100.
The project had lost $1,100. On a $42,000 job.
Sarah wasn't shocked because the numbers were bad. She was shocked because she'd had no idea. For six weeks, the project had felt successful. The client was happy. The work was good. The team was busy. And busy, it turns out, is not the same thing as profitable.
The Gap Between Revenue and Profit
Most business owners know their revenue. They watch invoices go out, track what's been paid, check the bank balance. Revenue feels real because it's visible.
Project-level profit is a different animal entirely. It requires you to know not just what came in, but what went out — and to attribute those costs to the right project, at the right time, before it's too late to do anything about them.
This is harder than it sounds. Labour costs don't appear on an invoice; they live in timesheets. Contractor costs might sit in an email thread until someone raises a bill. Expenses get expensed at the end of the month. Software subscriptions are allocated to overhead rather than to the project that actually consumed them.
By the time all of that data is assembled — usually by a bookkeeper at month-end, or worse, at quarter-end — the project is done. The decisions have been made. The scope creep has already crept. The extra hours have already been worked.
You're not managing the project anymore. You're just accounting for it.
Why This Happens to Good Businesses
It's worth being clear: this isn't a problem that only affects disorganised businesses. Sarah's studio wasn't chaotic. They had project management software, a separate time-tracking tool, Xero for accounting, and a shared drive full of documents. They had systems.
What they didn't have was a system where those pieces talked to each other in real time.
Timesheets lived in one tool. Bills and expenses lived in Xero. Project status lived in a project management board. Nobody had a view that combined all three into a running project P&L — because building that view required someone to manually pull data from three different places, reconcile it, and build a spreadsheet. That took time. So it happened monthly, not daily.
This is the quiet cost of the patchwork approach to business software. Each tool works fine in isolation. The gaps between them are where the visibility disappears.
And when visibility disappears, the Business Triangle starts to shift in dangerous ways.
When Admin Eats Your Visibility
There's a framework worth thinking about here. Every business owner divides their working hours across three things: doing the actual work (Craft), finding new clients and revenue (Business Development), and running the business itself (Administration).
In a healthy business, the rough split looks something like 50% Craft, 30% Business Development, 20% Administration. That's sustainable. You're delivering quality work, growing the pipeline, and keeping the engine running.
But when your systems are fragmented, administration expands to fill the gaps. Someone has to manually reconcile the timesheets with the project budget. Someone has to build the monthly report. Someone has to chase down which expenses belong to which client. That work is invisible — it doesn't feel like admin, it feels like "just checking the numbers" — but it consumes hours that should be going to craft or growth.
Worse, even after all that effort, the output is still a lagging indicator. You did the work, and you still don't know where you stand until three weeks after the fact.
The death spiral version of this looks like: admin expands, craft quality drops because everyone's stretched, business development stalls because the owner is buried, revenue softens, which creates more pressure, which creates more admin. You can be fully booked and quietly going backwards.
Project profitability blindness is one of the earliest warning signs.
What Real-Time Looks Like in Practice
Let's take a different scenario. Marcus runs a physiotherapy clinic in Brisbane with four practitioners and a practice manager. Each client has a treatment plan — some are six sessions, some are ongoing. Each session is revenue, but each session also has a cost: practitioner time, room allocation, consumables.
With real-time cost tracking, Marcus can see — at any point during a client's treatment plan — whether that plan is on track financially. If a complex case is taking 40% more practitioner time than the initial assessment suggested, he knows before session four, not after session eight. He can have a conversation with the client about extending the plan, or adjust the approach, or simply factor it into his pricing for similar cases in the future.
That's a fundamentally different kind of decision-making. It's not reactive. It's not forensic. It's just... current.
Or consider a marketing agency running a six-month retainer for a B2B software client. The retainer covers a fixed monthly fee. Each month, the team logs hours against the account. If the account is consistently consuming 30% more hours than the retainer allows for, the account manager can see that in week two of month three — not at the annual review when the client wants to renew at the same rate.
In both cases, the business owner isn't smarter or more diligent. They just have access to the right information at the right time.
The Three Costs That Hide in Plain Sight
For most project-based businesses, profitability leaks from three places:
Labour is the biggest one. If your timesheets aren't being logged against specific projects in real time, you're estimating. And estimates drift. A project that was scoped for 80 hours often runs to 110 because small overruns accumulate invisibly — a few extra revision rounds here, a client call that ran long there. None of those feel significant in the moment. Together, they can turn a profitable project into a break-even one.
Contractor and subcontractor costs are the sneaky ones. You bring in a specialist. They send an invoice three weeks later. By then, the project is closed and the invoice is just... overhead. Attaching those costs to the right project, in real time, requires either discipline or a system that makes it automatic.
Expenses and materials are often the smallest category but the most frequently misallocated. Software licences, stock images, travel, printing — these get expensed to a general account and never make it into the project's cost column. Which means every project looks slightly more profitable than it is, and you never quite understand why the overall margin is lower than you'd expect.
When all three of these flow into a single project-level view automatically — timesheets feeding in as hours are logged, bills categorised as they're approved, expenses allocated at the point of submission — the picture becomes accurate. And accurate, current information is what separates businesses that manage by feel from businesses that manage by fact.
A Note on Scope Creep
One thing that real-time project P&L makes viscerally clear is scope creep. Not in an abstract "we need to manage scope better" way, but in a concrete "this project has consumed 73% of its budget and we're only at the halfway point" way.
That's a conversation you can have with a client. It's a boundary you can draw. It's a change order you can raise.
Without that visibility, scope creep is just something that happens to you. With it, scope creep becomes a decision — one you make consciously, with full awareness of the cost.
For service businesses in particular — consultants, agencies, IT support providers, event managers, accountants — scope creep is often the single largest driver of project underperformance. Not bad pricing, not inefficient teams. Just work that expanded beyond what was agreed, invisibly, because nobody was watching the running total.
What Opus Does Here (and What It Doesn't)
This is the problem that platforms like Opus are built to address. Not by adding another dashboard to your existing stack, but by connecting the data that's currently sitting in separate tools.
When timesheets, project budgets, bills, and expenses all live in the same system — sharing one data model rather than syncing between separate ones — a project-level P&L isn't a report you generate. It's a number that's always current. Every hour logged updates it. Every bill approved updates it. Every expense submitted updates it.
That doesn't mean the number is always good. Sometimes a project is underwater and there's nothing to be done about it. But more often, the real-time view gives you a window to act — to have a scope conversation, to reassign resources, to accelerate delivery before costs compound further.
Opus isn't the only way to get there. You could build something similar with a well-maintained spreadsheet, a disciplined team, and a lot of manual reconciliation. Some businesses do exactly that. The question is whether the time that process consumes is a good use of the hours you have.
Back to Sarah
Sarah's studio didn't collapse after the $1,100 loss. But it did change how she ran the business.
The first thing she did was require timesheets to be logged daily rather than reconstructed at the end of the week. The second was to set a budget for every project and check it weekly. The third was to build a simple rule: if a project hits 70% of its budget before it's 70% complete, someone has to flag it.
Those three changes — none of them complicated — meant that the next big project surfaced a problem in week three rather than week seven. The scope conversation happened while there was still time to have it. The project finished profitable.
The lesson wasn't that Sarah needed better software. It was that she needed better visibility, earlier. The software just made it easier to maintain.
The Question to Ask Yourself
If you're a business owner who can tell me your revenue for last month but not your profit on your three biggest projects, this post is for you.
Not because revenue doesn't matter — it does. But revenue is what you charge. Profit is what you keep. And the gap between the two lives in the projects, in the hours, in the costs that accumulate while you're busy doing the work.
The question isn't whether you're busy. The question is which of your projects are actually making money — and whether you'd know if one of them stopped.
If the honest answer is "I'd find out at month-end," it might be worth thinking about what that's costing you.
You can explore how Opus handles project-level cost tracking at [opus.net.au](https://opus.net.au), or take a look at the [pricing page](https://opus.net.au/pricing) if you're curious about what it costs to get started.