Projects and time spent: measuring profitability with Dolibarr

Why a loss-making project is discovered too late

A consulting project is sold on a quote, delivered over several weeks, then invoiced. In between, nobody compares the time actually spent with the time sold. The overrun shows up in the annual accounts, when there is nothing left to fix. Take an audit assignment sold for a given number of days. The client adds requests, the team accepts them out of courtesy, and everyone keeps the total in their head. By the final invoice, the margin has gone. The problem is not the invoicing tool. It is the lack of data attached to the project. Dolibarr can link quotes, orders, invoices, purchases and time to a single project record. The team still has to feed this data as work goes on. This guide describes a simple way to organise that, without weighing down your staff's daily routine.

One project record per commercial commitment

Start with one rule: every accepted quote leads to a project. Create the project record, attach the third party, then link the quote, the order and, later, the invoices. Give the project a readable reference and a named owner. The owner is the person who answers for progress and margin. Also set the planned dates, because they help you detect slippage. Avoid catch-all projects such as "Miscellaneous client X". They mix work with different profitability and make any analysis useless. For consulting, agency or engineering businesses, the page on solutions for professional services shows how this logic works day to day. Finally, check that the Projects module is enabled and that permissions let staff see the projects they work on, but not those of others.

Break down what was sold into tasks

The project alone is not enough. You need tasks. Take the lines of the quote and turn them into tasks: scoping, development, acceptance testing, training. Each task gets a planned time, expressed in the same unit as the quote, and an assigned person. This planned time is what you will later compare with the time consumed. Dolibarr can track a progress percentage for each task. Ask the team to update it every time they log time, not at the end of the project. For example, a task planned for ten hours has already used eight, with declared progress of thirty percent. The warning signal is immediate. Without this breakdown, you only see a global total that does not tell you where the time goes. Keep tasks broad enough to stay manageable, but precise enough to be compared with the quote.

• Turn each service line of the quote into a separate task.
• Enter a planned time and an owner for each task.
• Update progress each time time is logged.
• Create a dedicated task for out-of-scope requests, to isolate them.

Log time every week, on the right task

Everything depends on logging discipline. A weekly entry on Friday beats an approximate monthly catch-up. Each team member assigns hours to a specific task, with a short comment recalling what was done. Dolibarr offers native time entry on tasks, which you can use as it is. If your team logs a lot of time, a weekly timesheet view with a stopwatch and manager validation makes a real difference. That is what DolicraftTimesheet offers. In both cases, define a cost rate per hour for each team member in advance. It turns hours into cost, and therefore into margin. This rate is part of your internal management and should stay confidential. A manager who reviews timesheets before the end of the week corrects allocation errors while they are still fresh.

Match time, purchases and invoicing

Time is only one of the costs. Subcontracting, travel and licences also weigh on the result. Attach each supplier invoice and each expense report to the relevant project. As with time, the habit is built at entry: when you record the supplier invoice, you pick the project. Then open the project record, which gathers the linked items. There you compare what has been invoiced, what remains to invoice and what has been spent. For fixed-price projects, margin is the amount sold minus the cost of time and purchases. For time-and-materials projects, you compare the rate billed with the cost rate. Our article on structuring supplier purchases explains how to make this part reliable upstream.

Set up a short, regular project review

Data is only useful if someone looks at it. Hold a fifteen-minute review every two weeks with the project owners. For each active project, ask three questions. Is the time consumed consistent with progress? Are purchases staying within budget? Are there out-of-scope requests to price? If a gap appears, act right away: a quote amendment, rebalancing the team, a discussion with the client. A project drifting off course is dealt with midway, not at delivery. Keep a record of recurring gaps. If the same tasks always exceed their estimate, it is your estimating method that needs adjusting, not the team. Over time, your quotes rely on durations actually observed, and your next projects start from a more reliable base.

Your next step: a pilot project

Do not roll everything out at once. Choose one ongoing, mid-sized project and apply the method: a project record linked to the quote, tasks taken from the quote, time logged every week, purchases attached. After a few weeks, compare the result with your gut feeling. The gap is often instructive. If you would like support to set up projects, permissions and time entry, our teams work on this kind of setup. Describe your business via the contact page and we will tell you how to organise project tracking in your instance.