Excel templates · Agencies & services
Project Costing Template (Excel) — Margin per Project, Free
One column per project: the fee, the hours quoted, the hours booked and the internal cost behind them. It ends on the number every agency argues about — the hourly rate you realised, as opposed to the one on the rate card.
The download
Free download
Download: Project costing & margin
- Quoted hours against booked hours, per project
- Internal cost per hour, not the sales rate
- Freelancers and licences as their own cost line
- Margin in euros, in percent, and as a realised hourly rate
No email, no sign-up. Formulas already wired up.
The sheet itself
- Quoted hours against booked hours, per project
- Internal cost per hour, not the sales rate
- Freelancers and licences as their own cost line
- Margin in euros, in percent, and as a realised hourly rate
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Project costing & margin | |||||||||||||
| 2 | Fill in the blue cells — every other cell is a formula and works itself out. foreqast.app | |||||||||||||
| 3 | Project A | Project B | Project C | Project D | Project E | |||||||||
| 4 | ||||||||||||||
| 5 | €24,000 | €8,500 | €46,000 | €12,500 | €31,000 | |||||||||
| 6 | 180 | 70 | 340 | 95 | 240 | |||||||||
| 7 | €133.33 | €121.43 | €135.29 | €131.58 | €129.17 | |||||||||
| 8 | ||||||||||||||
| 9 | 214 | 68 | 402 | 131 | 236 | |||||||||
| 10 | €62.00 | €62.00 | €62.00 | €62.00 | €62.00 | |||||||||
| 11 | €13,268 | €4,216 | €24,924 | €8,122 | €14,632 | |||||||||
| 12 | €3,200 | €0 | €9,400 | €1,800 | €2,600 | |||||||||
| 13 | €16,468 | €4,216 | €34,324 | €9,922 | €17,232 | |||||||||
| 14 | ||||||||||||||
| 15 | €7,532 | €4,284 | €11,676 | €2,578 | €13,768 | |||||||||
| 16 | 31.4 % | 50.4 % | 25.4 % | 20.6 % | 44.4 % | |||||||||
| 17 | €112.15 | €125.00 | €114.43 | €95.42 | €131.36 | |||||||||
| 18 | 34 | -2 | 62 | 36 | -4 | |||||||||
The blue cells are yours to fill in. Every other cell is a formula and works itself out.
How to use it
- 1
Use your internal cost rate, not your sales rate
Fully loaded salary, employer costs, holiday and non-billable time, divided by the hours actually available. For most agencies that is between €55 and €80.
- 2
Book every hour, including the ones you will not bill
Revisions, calls, the extra concept round. Hours you do not book are not hours you did not pay for — they just disappear from the margin calculation.
- 3
Compare the realised rate against your target
Fee ÷ hours booked is the rate you actually got. Held against your rate card, it is the clearest measure of how well you scope.
- 4
Read the overrun row across all projects
One project over budget is a project. Every project over budget by roughly a fifth is a pricing problem, and it is fixed in the quote, not in the delivery.
A worked example
A project that made money and lost the rate
- Project C — fee
- €46,000
- Quoted hourly rate
- €135.29
- Hours booked vs quoted
- 402 vs 340
- Project margin
- €11,676
- Realised hourly rate
- €114.43
The project is profitable — €11,676, a 25% margin. But 62 hours of overrun took €21 an hour off the rate, which is €8,400 on this project alone. Repeat that across a year of projects and it is a full-time salary, invisible because every individual project “made money”.
The mistakes that break it
Costing hours at the sales rate
Using €135 as the cost of an hour makes every project look like a loss. The cost of an hour is what you pay for it, not what you sell it for.
Leaving freelancers out of the project
A €9,400 freelancer invoice booked to “external costs” at company level is a project margin overstated by twenty points.
Only calculating it when the project is done
At 60% of the hours with 30% of the work delivered, there is still something to do about it. After the final invoice there is not.
Where the template stops
It does not know your capacity
A 30% margin on every project still loses money if half the team is idle. Project margin and utilisation are two different questions.
Utilisation calculatorThe hours have to come out of the time tracker by hand
Every project, every week, exported and pasted. It is the reason project costing sheets are usually filled in once, at the end.
It says nothing about when the money arrives
A profitable project invoiced on completion with 30 days' terms is four months of payroll you fund yourself.
13-week cash-flow planWhat comes after the spreadsheet
Project profitabilityBooked hours against fixed payroll, project by project — without re-exporting the time tracker every Monday.Calculators