Project Economy Module

Project Cost Tracking Software

Every project cost report is built on one number: what an hour of your team actually costs. Get that number wrong and the margin, the estimate at completion and the decision you take from them are all wrong together. SUNAGO Matrix derives it from salary, real utilization, holiday and overhead, then tracks cost and forecast on every project from the first logged hour.

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The cost rate almost everyone uses is wrong

Ask a firm what a consultant costs per hour and the usual answer is salary divided by a standard working year. It is a tidy calculation and it is wrong in a specific, predictable direction: it always makes projects look more profitable than they are.

Nobody bills a standard year. Take out vacation entitlement. Adjust for anyone on part-time capacity. Then multiply by the utilization the person actually achieves, which for most consulting firms sits well below the target on the wall. What remains is the number of hours you can genuinely charge that salary against, and it is a great deal smaller than 1,850.

Then there is everything the billable hours have to carry: the office, the software, the operations manager, the salaries of every colleague who bills nothing. Divided across the firm's total billable hours, that overhead lands on each hour too.

SUNAGO Matrix computes cost price per hour this way as standard, from the salary, capacity, holiday and utilization figures held against each employee. Nothing is typed in and nothing is blended. Every project cost, margin and Forecast at Completion in the system inherits it.

What the difference looks like in money

One consultant, EUR 70,000 annual gross salary, 25 days holiday, full-time. The naive method on the left, the derived method on the right. The illustrative figures below use a 1,850-hour nominal year and firm overhead of EUR 20 per billable hour.

StepSalary / nominal yearDerived from real utilization
Hours the salary is spread over1,850 nominal hours1,850 less 185 holiday hours, times 70% utilization = 1,166
Salary cost per billable hourEUR 37.84EUR 60.03
Overhead share per billable hourUsually omittedEUR 20.00
True cost per billable hourEUR 37.84EUR 80.03
Margin at a EUR 95 sell rate60% and comfortable16% and exposed

Same consultant, same salary, same sell rate. One method reports a project running at 60 percent margin, the other reports 16 percent. A firm using the first will keep bidding at EUR 95 an hour and quietly wonder why a healthy-looking portfolio does not turn into cash at the end of the year.

The gap widens as utilization falls. At 55 percent rather than 70 percent, the same person costs over EUR 96 per billable hour all-in, and EUR 95 is a loss. This is the arithmetic behind most of the margin surprises in professional services, and it is set out in full in true cost per hour for consulting firms.

What the project economy module tracks

All of it live, all of it from the same logged hours, with nothing to reconcile at month end.

System-calculated cost per hour

Derived from salary, part-time capacity, vacation entitlement, actual utilization and each person's share of company overhead. Nothing typed in, nothing blended.

Forecast at Completion on every project

FAC as a named, standard metric on every project, updating from logged hours rather than from a status someone selected, with a drill-down across time, materials, external services and expenses.

Live margin and profit and loss

Real-time profit and loss per project, with margin percentage visible while the work is running rather than after the invoice has gone out.

Budget against actual

Budget tracking across phases and milestones, with progress measured in hours consumed rather than a completion percentage typed into a field.

Financial danger warnings

Projects flag themselves when the forecast turns. The project finance timeline shows how cost and margin have moved, so a slow drift is as visible as a sudden one.

External services and materials

Subcontractors, external services and materials carried on the project alongside labour, plus expenses with automated markup where you bill them on.

Cost estimation that improves with every project

Estimating the cost of a project is guesswork the first time and evidence every time after, provided the evidence was recorded properly. Because hours are logged against phases and the cost rate behind them is derived rather than assumed, a finished project in SUNAGO Matrix is a usable benchmark for the next proposal instead of a number nobody trusts.

That closes the loop that most firms leave open. The estimate informs the budget, the budget is tracked against actual hours, the variance is visible as Forecast at Completion moves, and the completed project tells you how good the original estimate was. Pricing stops being a matter of instinct and repeated optimism.

For the accounting side of the same question, estimate at completion and forecast at completion explained covers the formulas, and project profitability tracking covers what to do with the output.

Where the cost data comes from

Timesheets

Every logged hour reprices the project at that person's derived cost rate.

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Project Management

Budgets, phases and milestones give the cost tracking something to track against.

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KPI Reporting

Project economics rolled up to the firm, next to utilization and revenue per head.

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Project costing: common questions

Cost rates, Forecast at Completion, and how this differs from project accounting.

What is project costing?
Project costing is the practice of attaching every cost a project consumes to the project itself, so its margin can be read while the work is still running rather than after it has been invoiced. For a services firm the dominant cost is labour, which makes the cost rate per hour the number that decides whether the whole exercise is meaningful. Materials, subcontractors and expenses sit on top, but if the hourly rate is wrong then every project cost report built on it is wrong in the same direction.
How do you calculate the true cost of a project hour?
Not by dividing annual salary by a nominal year such as 1,850 or 2,000 hours, which is the most common mistake and always flatters the margin. SUNAGO Matrix takes each person's annual gross salary and divides it by their own billable hours: capacity adjusted for part-time percentage, minus vacation entitlement, multiplied by their actual utilization rate. On top of that sits their share of company overhead, calculated as yearly operating expenses divided by the firm's total billable hours, with the salaries of non-billable colleagues rolled into that overhead pool. A consultant at 60 percent utilization therefore costs materially more per billable hour than a colleague on the same salary at 85 percent.
What is Forecast at Completion, and is it the same as EAC?
Forecast at Completion is what the project is now expected to cost in total: what it has consumed so far, plus the remaining allocated work. It is the same idea other tools label Estimate at Completion, and we use one name rather than two for the same forward look. FAC sits on every project and updates from logged hours, so the warning arrives while there is still room to act on it. The drill-down breaks it out across time, materials, external services and expenses rather than giving you a single opaque number.
How is this different from project accounting in an ERP?
Project accounting records what happened and reconciles it to the ledger, which is necessary and backward-looking. Project economy asks whether the job you are running today will make money, and it needs a forward view and a truthful cost rate to answer. SUNAGO Matrix is built for the second job. It is not a replacement for your bookkeeping, and it does not pretend to be.
Do we have to enter cost rates manually?
No, and that is the point. Cost price per hour is system-calculated from the salary, capacity, vacation and utilization figures held against each employee in the HR module. When someone's utilization moves, their cost rate moves with it, and every project they are on reprices. A tool that asks you to type in a blended rate will report a project margin that is confidently wrong.
What warns us when a project is going wrong?
Financial danger warnings sit on the project alongside the numbers, and the project finance timeline shows how margin, cost and forecast have moved over the life of the job rather than only where they stand today. The combination is what turns cost tracking from a monthly report into something you can act on in week three.

Find out what your hours actually cost

EUR 3 per seat per month billed yearly, every module included, free onboarding and data transfer. 14-day trial, no credit card required.

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