The Actuals drill-downs

Flowtly Editorial Team4 min

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.

The rows sum to the total the panel was opened from, and the total is repeated at the foot so you can see that they do.

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 is allocated. A cost rate belongs to a person, not to a person on a particular project — there is no measured per-project cost to report. So the period's cost is split across projects in proportion to the hours logged to each one in that period, and every cost and margin figure on these rows follows from that split.

The consequence is the reason the distinction is drawn at all: an allocated figure describes how a shared cost was apportioned, not what a project actually cost. It is sound for comparing projects against each other and for finding the one that is carrying the least of its weight. Quoted outside Flowtly as a project's actual cost or actual margin, it would be wrong. The panel repeats this next to the numbers.

Splitting by hours rather than by revenue is deliberate. Apportioning cost in proportion to what each project earned would drive every project's margin percentage towards the same value by construction — which would hide the single thing the panel is opened to find.

The rows always add up

A few rules follow from the panel's one obligation, which is to explain a total rather than to restate it:

  • Internal and non-billable work stays in. It earns nothing, and shows a dash rather than a zero in the revenue column, but it absorbs its share of the cost. Time spent costs money whether or not anyone is billed for it, and dropping the line would stop the rows summing to the total.
  • A project with no logged hours takes no cost. It has no share of the hours, so it has no share of the cost.
  • The figures shown are rounded, and still add up. Rounding is distributed so the column sums exactly to the total shown, rather than drifting a unit away from it.
  • Cost that belongs to nobody is stated, not swallowed. Where the period holds cost but no hours were logged to hang it on, the panel names the amount it could not allocate.

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.

Connection map

Derived fromPart ofRefers toFulfilsUses upPlanned vs actual
Documented hereDocumented elsewhere
job-size sizes capacity. project needs role. role drawn from position. role declares demand. booking fills role. booking books person. absence reduces capacity. booking consumes capacity. bench derived from capacity. booking planned vs actual time-entry.sizesneedsdrawn fromdeclaresfillsbooksreducesconsumesderived fromplanned vs actualJJob Size — The employment capacity an agreement commits to, in hours and minutes per week. The FTE percentage is calculated from it rather than entered: someone whose hours per week equal their job size is full-time.Job SizeCCapacity — A person's contracted week, less absence. Bookings are measured against their own contracted week, so 20 hours fills 83% of a 0.6 FTE and not 50%.CapacityPProject — The core organizational unit for a business initiative, client engagement or internal work. Everything tracked — time, cost, invoicing, profitability — hangs off one.ProjectRRole — One job to be done on a project. It may be open, partly filled, filled or over-filled, and it exists whether or not anyone is booked on it.RolePPosition — The catalogue of job titles a project role is drawn from.PositionDDemand — What a role needs, stated apart from who is doing it. Stored as one slot per full-time person, so 2.5 people is three slots. A role with none declared is treated as one full-time person.DemandBBooking — One person committed to one role for a stretch of weeks, at a percentage of their time. A booking is a plan, not a record of work done.BookingPPerson — An employee. The central record the rest of the workforce data hangs off — profile, documents, leave, benefits, rates.PersonAAbsence — Approved time off. It removes hours from a person's week before any booking is counted against it.AbsenceTThe bench — Everyone with room left in the period on screen, most free first. Derived from capacity on every period change; never a list anyone maintains.The benchTTime entry — What actually happened — work time logged against a project.Time entry