Project profitability
Whether a project earned more than it cost to deliver — the gap between what you billed and the fully-loaded labor and expense behind it.
Project profitability measures whether a project made money: the revenue it generated minus the fully-loaded cost to deliver it — labor at real cost rates, plus any hardware, software, subcontractors, and travel. Expressed as a margin, it answers the question that decides whether a service line is worth running: after everything, did this project come out ahead, and by how much?
The trap is treating billed price as profit. A $10,000 fixed-fee migration that took 30% more engineer hours than quoted can quietly land at a slim margin — or a loss — while the invoice still reads $10,000. You only see it if you track the hours actually spent against the price agreed.
Why it matters for MSPs
Fixed-fee and block-hour project work concentrates risk on the MSP: scope creep, underestimated dependencies, and rework all eat margin that the client never sees. Without per-project cost visibility, an MSP can grow revenue while shrinking profit and not know which projects are the culprits.
- Separates the profitable service lines from the ones you're subsidizing.
- Improves the next quote — real hours-vs-estimate data is the best pricing feedback there is.
- Catches scope creep early, while a change order is still a reasonable conversation.
How it works in Current
Current is honest about its lane: it runs alongside your PSA and is not itself a billing system. What it contributes is accurate, project-level time capture — native time entry that flows to your PSA — Autotask, ConnectWise, or Halo PSA — which stays the billing source of truth. That clean tie between the hours a project actually consumed and the work breakdown it consumed them on is the raw material profitability analysis depends on; the financials live in your PSA, and Current keeps them fed with reality.