Overview
What Margin>Overview report can tell you | In this section, we'll get into what the Margin Overview report is for and what benefit you can get from using it! |
How to Navigate the Margin Overview Report |
This section we've broken down the sections of what you'll see in this report and how to use it. |
What the Margin Overview report can tell you
The Margin report highlights trends in your profitability across departments, roles, offerings, clients, workers, and projects. A monthly review of how your margin performed in the last month is an important part of catching issues before they become big problems for the organization.
The table in this report features custom alerting so that you can quickly understand where your margin is under/over based on your preferences. Use the slider to set an alert threshold with anything under your threshold appearing in red and anything over appearing in blue.
Paying attention to trends in your average bill rate and profit margins across clients, projects, and teams will draw your attention to potential downstream issues in pricing or delivery execution.
How to Navigate the Margin Overview Report
In order to more easily understand what you're seeing, we've segmented the page into 4 basic sections in order to break down what you'll find there, and make it easier to navigate this page, understand what you're seeing, and best make use of the powerful data at your fingertips.
(1) Filters and Customization
This part of the page is where you'll pick out what Data segments you'll want to slice Margin by. Many of these options will be standard in one or all reports. In the top left, you'll find Filters which you can use to segment your data (with options for Department, Financial Model, Stage, Client, Project Status, Worker Type and People Tags).
On the right side of the page, you'll pick out the Date Range, you want to look at - as well as the period you want to see period data by (Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly).
Lastly, in green in the far-right corner, you can create a Saved View for easy access to the filter-state you've chosen in the future!
(2) Graph
The Graph on this page will be a visual representation of the data you'll find below, over the timeframe you've selected. You'll see Actual Revenue and upcoming Planed Revenue, to compare to your Costs, as well as the Actual Margin (past) and Projected Margin (future) between Plans/Actuals and Costs.
This graph will tell the overall story of the data you've selected and which is shown below, in order to quickly highlight deviations for you to dig into.
(3) Drill Downs/Search/Columns
Between the Graph and the Data set that it's pulling from, there are a few additional customization options. On the left side, you'll see Drill Down options - using these, you can view your data by Department, Role, Offering, Client, Person or Project in order to get a more broad or granular perspective on which segments of each you have a higher/lower margin on.
On the left side, you'll see a customizable Alerting Threshold - helps you pick out instances where Margin is higher or lower than expected. There is also an Eye-icon you can click on to hide/reveal different columns in the data set.
Finally, you'll also see a Search function to look for a single Department/Role/Offering/Etc. and a CSV option to save your data set for future reference.
(4) Data Set
At the very bottom of the page is where you'll see the Data Set you've selected. While (as mentioned above) you can customize the columns, here are the basic data points that are revealed by the Revenue >Margin Report:
- Revenue - These are the total earnings for the segment (Department, Role, Offering, etc.) you're looking at.
- Average Bill Rate - This is the average bill rate per hour for the segment, calculated by Revenue divided by Hours.
- Costs - This is the total Project Costs.
- Gross Profit - This is the profit for the segment as calculated by Revenue minus Costs.
- Margin - This is the percent difference between Revenue and Costs, as calculated by Gross Profit divided by Revenue (Gross Profit/Revenue x 100).
These options work together to help you highlight which Departments, Roles, Offerings, and other segments have the highest Margin allowing you to see which are the most and least profitable.