A firm can have every project in the green and still lose money. The gap is overhead: rent, software, finance, HR, the bench. Project tools rarely carry it. In our benchmark, Productive handles it in its top tier with one formula and rent typed by hand, BigTime with manual entries per project, and Kantata documents none.
Three tiers, spread step by step
KPilot sorts cost centres into three tiers. General costs, such as rent and admin. Support teams, such as finance and IT. Delivery teams, who bill. Each tier is spread onto the next by a key you choose: a fixed share, headcount, direct labor, revenue or capacity. Support teams that serve each other are settled in turns until the numbers stop moving.
Plan first, then the books
Until a month is booked, the plan carries it. Once QuickBooks has the month’s expenses, they replace the plan, and a drawer shows the plan, what was booked and the accounts behind it. At Mesabrook, $143,000 of cost centres reach the delivery teams; for Transformation and Change Management that is $17.60 on every hour in November.
What changes
Client margins go down, but they become accurate. The firm’s break-even hourly rate becomes a number you can quote. And when a partner asks whether to take work at $750 a day, the answer comes from the cost data.