Answers to the questions we hear most often about reporting in Teamwork.com — covering Custom Reports, the Time Report, Profitability Report, Utilisation Report, Budget Reporting, Dashboards, Formula Fields, Scheduled Reports, Exports, and Advanced Reporting.
In this article
- Budget Reporting
- Profitability Report
- Financial Overview Report
Budget Report
Are new budget columns available on Custom Reports?
Yes — you can now add Budget Used (Time), Budget Used (Financial), Budget Capacity (Time), Budget Capacity (Financial), and Budget Used % as columns. They all work with sorting, summary rows, charts, formula fields, and Advanced Reporting.
Why does Budget Capacity Used differ from Logged Time on a Custom Report?
Budget Capacity Used reflects all the time consumed against the active budget, regardless of the date range you've set on the report. Logged Time, on the other hand, only counts time logged within that report's date range. The budget's type — billable, non-billable, or logged — also affects which time gets counted.
Can I measure budget burndown relative to project progress?
There's no dedicated burndown widget yet, but you can build your own using formula fields — comparing budget capacity used % against a formula that tracks the project timeline, and showing different messages depending on how far apart they are (for example, a 10% or 20% gap). A native burndown option for dashboards is something we're exploring.
Can I see budget capacity vs estimated time by project?
Yes — build a project Custom Report and add the Budget Capacity (Time) and Estimated Time columns. You can also add a formula field to calculate the difference and flag projects that are over or under budget.
Does the Profitability Report account for retainer budget carryover?
Yes. Carryover details are shown in a popover on the budget insights view, and forecasted revenue for retainer and fixed fee projects accounts for future budgets by default.
Profitability Report
Why do users on retainer/fixed fee projects show $0 revenue?
On retainer and fixed fee budgets, revenue comes from the budget fee itself, not from individual users' logged time — the project generates the revenue, not the person. For the full picture, look at project-level profitability, which includes the budget fee as revenue.
Why does the Profitability Report show different logged time than the Time Report?
This is most often caused by overlapping active budgets. The Profitability Report counts time per budget, so if two budgets overlap, the same time logs can be counted more than once. The Time Report ignores budgets entirely and counts each time log only once. Check your project for overlapping budget periods if the numbers don't match.
How does the Profitability Report handle fixed fee budgets spanning multiple quarters?
The full fixed fee is currently counted as revenue in every reporting period the budget overlaps, even by a single day — so a $24K budget spanning 9 months would show $24K in revenue in each quarter it touches. To get an accurate profit figure, set your report's date range to cover the entire budget duration. We're considering changing this so revenue is only counted in the period the budget starts.
Can I add custom field columns to the Profitability Report?
Not currently — the Profitability Report has a fixed set of columns. You can recreate most of its data using a project Custom Report, which does support custom fields, though you'll lose the expand-row and grouping features that come with the Profitability Report.
Can I see budget financial targets on the Profitability Report?
Not yet — this is something we're looking to add to both the Profitability Report and Custom Reports. The main design challenge is deciding which target to show when a project has more than one budget within the reporting period.
On T&M budgets based on billable time, why is non-billable cost showing as $0?
For time & materials budgets based on billable time, non-billable time is excluded from the cost calculation entirely — costs are calculated as billable hours × cost rate, plus expenses. This is expected behavior for this type of budget.
Why does the Profitability Report show negative profit after a budget period ends?
Once a budget's end date passes, the report reverts to "no budget" calculations — revenue drops to $0 while costs continue accumulating from logged time and cost rates, which shows up as negative profit. To avoid this, extend the budget's dates to cover the full period of work, or set your report's date range to match the budget's duration.
Financial Overview Report
Why doesn't the parent row match the total of the rows beneath it when grouping by User, Role, Team or Task?
Fixed fee and retainer revenue belongs to the project, not to individual people or tasks, so it can't be split out. When you group by User, Role, Team or Task, the rows show only time-based revenue, marked with an information icon. The parent row still includes the full budget revenue, so it can add up to more than the rows under it. This is expected.
Why did revenue for a past period change after I updated a billable rate?
Revenue uses the billable rate that applied on the date the work was done. A rate change that starts today doesn't affect earlier periods. But if you give the new rate an earlier start date, all time logged from that date onwards is re-priced at the new rate, and past figures update to match. To keep historical revenue as it is, start the new rate from today.
How is the Financial overview report different from the Profitability Report?
The Profitability Report focuses on revenue, costs and profit from time that's already been logged against budgets. The Financial overview report also includes planned revenue from allocations, scoped revenue from task estimates, and forecasts such as Estimate to complete and Estimate at completion, so you can compare what's planned, what's expected and what's been earned in one place.