The Actuals drill-downs

Every figure on the Actuals tab is a total, and a total is the one thing you cannot take apart by looking at it. Two cells on a person's row open into the projects behind them.

They answer different questions at different scopes, and it is worth knowing which one you are opening:

• A week cell — what was this week made of?
• The trailing money cell — what did the whole period on screen earn, cost and leave?

Both split the same way: by the hours logged to each project. Because they share that basis, the two never contradict each other.

Opening a week

Select any week cell on a person's row — or press Enter or Space while it has focus — and a panel opens on Where the hours went, listing every project that week's hours were logged against.

Each line carries the project's colour, its hours, and a bar showing its share of the week. Lines are ordered heaviest first, and the panel ends with the week's total.

The share is measured against the hours actually logged that week, not against the person's contracted week. This panel is about composition, not utilisation: it answers what was the time spent on, and a bar filling half of it means half of the logged time, whatever the plan said.

Nothing here is inferred. The panel reduces the individual time entries that already exist upward into one line per project, so a week is never divided back down onto projects to make a figure appear. A week with nothing logged says so by name rather than opening empty.

The colours match the ones the row already uses, so a project never paints one way on the grid and another way one click later.

Seeing a person's logged time requires permission to view it. Where you do not have it, the panel says the week cannot be broken down rather than showing a blank one.

Opening the money

In the Money view, a person's revenue and margin figures open into a table headed How this figure was arrived at, covering the whole period on screen. There is one row per project, and a column each for:

• Hours — what was logged to that project in the period.
• Share — those hours as a percentage of the person's logged hours.
• Revenue — what the project earned.
• Cost (allocated) — the project's share of what the person cost.
• Margin — revenue less that allocated cost, with a percentage where there is revenue to take one against.

Project rows plus the separate Unattributed cost line reconcile to the contract-period cost shown at the foot.

Measured, and allocated

The two money columns do not have the same standing, and the panel says so rather than leaving you to assume.

Revenue is measured. Each person carries their own charge rate for each project, so what a project earned is a real figure for that project, not a portion of a larger one.

Cost uses one allocation basis for everyone: logged hours multiplied by the agreement cost rate on the day of the work. The panel labels project costs and margins as derived, including for hourly agreements. A rate change during the period therefore affects the hours worked after that change; it does not redistribute earlier costs.

For daily, weekly and monthly agreements, the contract-period cost can differ from the cost allocated to logged hours. The difference appears on its own Unattributed line. It is never spread across projects:

• A positive remainder means part of the contract cost was not allocated to logged project work.
• A negative remainder means logged work allocated more than the contract-period cost, for example because of overtime.
• A zero remainder means the allocated project costs already equal the period cost.
• An unavailable cost stays unavailable rather than appearing as zero.

Internal and non-billable work still receives the cost of its logged hours, even though it earns no revenue. A project with no logged hours receives no allocation. For an hourly agreement, the period cost follows logged hours, so its remainder is zero when all rates are available.

Project groups

Expand a person's period breakdown to see parent projects and their sub-projects. A parent subtotal includes its own reported time and all descendants. Hours are summed from exact seconds and rounded only for display; revenue is summed from the project figures. Parent subtotals do not present a cost or margin as a measured project result.

The parent subtotal repeats the work shown below it. Do not add parent and child figures together again.

Where some of the hours have no charge rate, the revenue figure is flagged as understated rather than presented as complete — the same honesty rule the totals above the grid follow.

Example use cases

• Open a week that under-ran its plan and find that the missing time went to another project entirely.
• Find which of the four projects a person worked on this quarter earned the least against the time it took.
• Check a project's share of the hours before reading its margin, so you know how much of the cost figure is apportioned.
• Confirm that a person's period revenue really is the sum of the projects underneath it before quoting it.
• Spot a period where cost could not be allocated because nothing was logged against it.