Project profitability

Tag income and costs to projects and see revenue, cost and margin per project over time.

What project profitability is

A project in Qontab is a label you attach to income and cost lines so you can measure one piece of work on its own — a client engagement, a build, a contract. Once your entries are tagged, the project page totals the revenue earned and the costs incurred against it and shows the margin (revenue minus cost). It answers the question every founder asks but few accounting tools answer cleanly: did this job actually make money?

Nothing about a project changes your general ledger. The same posted entries still flow into your profit & loss and balance sheet; the project tag is simply a second axis that lets Qontab slice those numbers per job without any duplicate bookkeeping.

Set up a project

Create a project with a short project code and a name. Everything else is optional but useful: link a client contact, set a start and end date, pick the project’s currency, and give it a budget so you can later compare planned against actual.

• Code & name — how the project shows up in lists and on tagged entries.
• Client — optionally tie the project to a contact for context.
• Budget — an expected cost figure Qontab measures actuals against.
• Status — planning, active, on hold, completed or archived (defaults to active).

Tag income and costs

Profitability is only as good as your tagging. When you record an income or expense, assign the relevant line to the project. From then on, that revenue or cost belongs to the job and rolls into its totals — automatically, the moment the entry is posted.

• Revenue — invoices and other income tagged to the project become its earned revenue.
• Costs — expenses, subcontractor bills and reimbursed charges tagged to it become its cost.
• Posted only — drafts are ignored, so a half-finished entry never moves the margin.

Read profitability

The project page shows three headline figures — income, expenses and profit — all in the project’s currency and totalled across the whole life of the job to date. If you set a budget, Qontab adds a budget-versus-actual block: the budgeted cost, the actual cost so far, and the variance between them, so an overrun is obvious before it becomes a surprise.

1. Income — the sum of revenue tagged to the project.
2. Expenses — the sum of costs tagged to it.
3. Profit — income minus expenses; this is your margin on the job.
4. Variance — budget minus actual cost, shown when the project has a budget.

Need a different cut? Budgets let you plan by account or by project, so you can pair this profitability read with a forward-looking budget for the same work.

Project lifecycle

A project moves through five statuses as the work evolves. The status is descriptive — it tidies your project list and signals where each job stands; it never changes how revenue or cost is calculated.

• Planning — scoped but not yet started.
• Active — in progress and accruing income and cost (the default for a new project).
• On hold — paused; figures stay frozen until it resumes.
• Completed — delivered; the final margin is locked in.
• Archived — closed and tucked out of the day-to-day list.

Track projects with AI (MCP)

Through the Qontab MCP connector, an AI assistant can manage projects in plain language. The project tools are list_projects, get_project, create_project, update_project, get_project_profitability and delete_project — so you can spin up a job, change its status, or pull its margin without leaving the chat.

These tools are an Enterprise-tier feature: the projects domain is gated to the Enterprise plan on the MCP connector, so a call on a lower plan returns an upgrade prompt rather than data.

FAQ