Your Project Management Tool Doesn't Know If You're Making Money

The Card That Never Moved

Sarah runs a twelve-person digital marketing agency in Brisbane. Last October, she finished a brand campaign for a mid-sized retail client — delivered on time, client was happy, team celebrated. Then her bookkeeper sent through the reconciled numbers.

The project had lost money. Not by a little. By $8,400.

The hours had blown out in week three when the client requested two rounds of unscoped revisions. The team logged the extra time, kept the cards moving in Asana, and delivered. But nobody — not Sarah, not her project lead, not her account manager — had visibility into what those extra hours were costing in real dollars. The project looked green right up until the invoice was paid and the actuals came in.

"We thought we were busy," Sarah told me. "Turns out we were just... working for free."

This is not a story about a badly run agency. It's a story about what happens when your project management tool and your financial data live in completely separate worlds.

What Generic PM Tools Actually Do Well

Let's be fair. Asana, Monday.com, and Trello are genuinely good at what they were built for: organising tasks, assigning work, tracking deadlines. For a team that needs to stop losing things in email threads, they're a real step forward.

If you're running a small team and your projects are relatively simple — fixed scope, predictable hours, clean handoffs — these tools do the job. The Kanban board is intuitive. The notification system keeps people accountable. The mobile apps are decent.

The problem isn't that these tools are bad. The problem is that they were designed to answer one question: *Is the work getting done?*

Growing businesses need to answer a different question: *Is the work worth doing?*

Those are not the same question.

The Financial Layer That's Always Missing

Here's what a typical project-based business actually needs to know at any given moment:

• How many hours have been logged against this project so far?
• What does that translate to in labour cost?
• How does that compare to the budget we quoted?
• Are we on track to hit our margin, or have we already blown it?
• Which team members are over-allocated this week?

Asana can answer the first question, loosely. It cannot answer the rest — not without exporting data, opening a spreadsheet, pulling timesheet records from a separate tool, and manually cross-referencing everything against the quote you stored somewhere in your CRM.

By the time you've done all that, the project is already over.

This is the core failure of generic project management tools for growing businesses. They track activity. They don't track cost. And cost is what determines whether your business is actually viable.

Three Industries, One Problem

The IT Managed Services Provider

Take a ten-person IT support firm in Melbourne. They run on retainers — clients pay a monthly fee for a defined number of support hours. The business looks predictable on paper. Recurring revenue, steady clients, low churn.

But some clients consistently consume more hours than their retainer covers. Others barely use their allocation. Without a system that connects time logged to client contracts in real time, the owner has no idea which retainers are profitable and which are quietly subsidising demanding clients.

They use Monday.com for ticket tracking. They use Harvest for timesheets. They use Xero for invoicing. Every month, someone spends two days pulling everything together into a spreadsheet to figure out where they stand. That's someone's entire week, every month, just to answer the question: *Are we making money on these clients?*

The answer should be available on a dashboard. Instead, it's a manual reconciliation exercise.

The Event Management Company

A Sydney-based events company manages corporate conferences, product launches, and gala dinners. Each event is its own project — unique scope, unique vendors, unique timeline. Margins are tight because venue costs, catering, AV, and staffing all have to be locked in weeks before the event, often before the final guest count is confirmed.

They use Trello to manage the event timeline. They use a separate spreadsheet to track the budget. They use another spreadsheet to track vendor invoices. When something changes — a client adds fifty guests, a venue upgrades the AV package — updating all three systems is a manual process that takes hours and introduces errors.

Last year, they undercharged a client by $3,200 because a vendor invoice arrived after the client invoice had already been sent. The data was in the system — just not in the same system.

The Architecture and Interior Design Studio

A boutique design studio in Melbourne takes on residential and commercial projects. Each project runs six to eighteen months, involves multiple consultants, and has clearly defined phases: concept, design development, documentation, construction administration.

They use Asana for project phases. They use Toggl for time tracking. They use Xero for billing. None of these tools talk to each other in any meaningful way.

The principal designer spends roughly four hours every Friday pulling together a project status update for the partners meeting. She's not doing design work during those four hours. She's doing data entry. She's reconciling three systems that should be one system.

Four hours a week is two hundred hours a year. At her billing rate, that's a significant chunk of revenue that simply disappears into administration.

The Business Triangle and the Admin Creep

There's a useful way to think about how business owners divide their time. In a healthy business, the split looks roughly like this: about half your time on the actual work you do — the craft, the service, the thing clients pay you for. About thirty percent on business development — finding new clients, nurturing relationships, building the pipeline. And about twenty percent on administration — invoicing, reporting, compliance, the operational overhead.

That's the target. That's what a well-run business looks like.

But when your tools don't talk to each other, administration expands to fill the gap. You spend an hour reconciling timesheets. Another hour chasing down a vendor invoice. Another hour building a project status report from three different data sources. Before long, you're spending forty percent of your time on admin. Then fifty. Then more.

When that happens, something else has to give. Usually it's the craft — the quality of the actual work starts to slip because the person responsible for it is buried in spreadsheets. Or it's business development — the pipeline dries up because nobody has time to nurture it.

This is the death spiral that kills otherwise good businesses. Not bad work. Not bad clients. Bad systems that make administration more expensive than it needs to be.

The irony is that the tools meant to help — the PM software, the time tracker, the accounting platform — often make it worse by creating more data silos that need to be manually bridged.

Why the Integration Approach Doesn't Really Solve It

The obvious response is: "Just integrate them. Use Zapier to connect Asana to Xero. Build an automation."

This works, sort of, for simple cases. But integrations are brittle. They break when one platform updates its API. They lag — sometimes by hours, sometimes by days. They require someone to build and maintain them. And they're fundamentally copying data between separate databases, which means there's always a reconciliation question: which system is the source of truth?

More importantly, integrations can sync data. They can't create shared context. When your project management tool sends a task completion to your accounting software, the accounting software doesn't understand what that task means in the context of the project budget. It just receives a data point.

Real financial visibility inside a project requires those concepts to be native to the same system — not bolted together after the fact.

What Project Management Actually Needs to Include

For a project-based business to have real control, the project itself needs to be the unit of truth. Everything else — time, cost, revenue, team allocation, client communication — should be visible through that lens.

That means:

• Time logged against a project should immediately update the project's cost tracking.: Not after an export. Not after a sync. Immediately.
• Expenses and vendor invoices should be attributable to specific projects: , so you can see actual cost versus budgeted cost at any point in the project lifecycle.
• Revenue — whether it's milestone billing, time-and-materials, or a fixed fee — should be visible alongside costs: , so you can see margin in real time, not just at project close.
• Client history should be connected to project history: , so when a client calls to discuss a change request, you can see everything in one place.

This isn't a wish list. These are table stakes for a business that wants to grow without losing control of its margins.

How Opus Approaches This

Opus was built around the idea that projects, finances, clients, and team data shouldn't live in separate systems. They're all aspects of the same business reality, so they should share the same database.

When a team member logs hours in Opus, those hours immediately feed into the project's cost calculations. When an expense is categorised, it's attributed to the relevant project. When a client's details change, they change everywhere — not because an integration synced it, but because there was only ever one record.

The result is that a project manager can open a project and see, in one view: how many hours have been logged, what that's cost in labour, what the outstanding expenses are, what's been invoiced, and what the current margin looks like. No exports. No reconciliation. No Friday afternoon spreadsheet ritual.

For businesses that already use Xero, Opus connects with a two-way sync — so invoices, payments, and expense data flow between the two systems without manual entry.

It's not magic. It's just what happens when the data model is designed around how businesses actually work, rather than around a specific workflow category like "task management" or "accounting."

The Question Worth Asking

If you're running a project-based business and you can't answer these questions right now — without opening a spreadsheet — it's worth thinking about what that's costing you:

• Which of your current projects is most profitable?
• Which client generates the best margin, not just the most revenue?
• How many hours has your team logged this week, and how does that compare to what's been budgeted?
• If a project runs ten percent over hours, what does that do to your margin?

These aren't advanced analytics questions. They're basic operational questions. If the answer requires a manual process, the tools aren't doing their job.

Sarah's agency still uses Asana for some internal task tracking. But after that $8,400 loss, she rebuilt her project management around a system where cost and progress live in the same place. The next time a client asked for unscoped revisions, the project lead could see — in real time — exactly what saying yes would cost.

They had the conversation with the client. Agreed on a scope change. Issued a change order. The project came in on budget.

Not because the team got better at their jobs. Because they could finally see what they were doing.

If you're curious whether a unified approach would work for your business, [Opus has a free tier](https://opus.net.au) worth exploring — no commitment required, and the pricing page has details on what's included at each level.