Marie is a partner at a 14-person structural engineering firm. She found out a project nicknamed “Green” was 18 percent over budget only when the client said no to an invoice. Her team had filled in timesheets every Friday, sometimes from memory, and the spreadsheet showed everything was fine. It was not fine.
Her first call was to ERPNext Consulting, and the conversation started with one simple question: what does each project actually cost, week by week?
The numbers that were hiding in plain sight
The ERPNext Consulting team set up project budgets with hourly rates for each engineer, then switched time logging from weekly memory to daily reality. Within six weeks, the data exposed three projects out of seven that were priced below what they actually cost to deliver. That gap added up to roughly $40,000 of profit leaking out per year — money the firm thought it was making.
- Planned hours versus booked hours, reviewed every Friday before payroll closed.
- Actual cost per hour compared to the billing rate for each project and each person.
- Remaining budget checked against the next milestone, so overruns surfaced two weeks early.
Why this hurts so many service firms
Most small consultancies treat a timesheet as an admin chore rather than a measurement tool. The result is that under-priced projects look profitable until the cash runs out. Marie’s firm now reviews project margins in a ten-minute Monday meeting, and they re-quote or re-scope any project that drops below a 35 percent margin target. The rule is simple: you cannot fix a margin problem you only discover at invoicing time.
What you can steal from this case tonight
Open your last three closed projects and compare the hours you billed with the hours your team actually worked. If any project is more than 15 percent off, you have found your error rate. That one calculation is the reason Marie called ERPNext Consulting — and the reason she now sleeps better at month-end.