Project margin = (revenue − cost of delivery) ÷ revenue, expressed as a percentage. A project billing $20,000 a month that consumes $13,000 of the assigned team's cost runs a 35% margin.
The subtlety is the cost side. For a services company, delivery cost is pro-rated labour: each assigned person's monthly cost × the share of their week spent on this project. Company overhead — the unstaffed bench, admin, office — deliberately stays out, because project margin answers a narrower question than company profit: is this engagement worth delivering at this rate? A company can run healthy 40% project margins and still lose money if half the team sits unallocated — that problem belongs to utilization, not to any single project.
Why measure per project rather than only company-wide:
- Blended numbers hide cross-subsidy. One flagship project at 60% can quietly fund two others at 5% for a year.
- The decisions are per-project. Rates, staffing seniority, scope pushback — every lever you can actually pull is attached to a specific engagement.
- Trends beat snapshots. A margin sliding while revenue stays flat is the classic signature of scope creep or a seniority mix drifting upward.
In Helia, the profitability view computes exactly this per project and per client — billable revenue run-rate minus the pro-rated cost of the people assigned, consolidated across currencies — with margin and margin % side by side, sortable.