Budgets & financials

The financial layer answers the question delivery tools usually dodge: is this engagement actually profitable?

The building blocks

• Rates — what an hour of each person’s work costs and what it bills for.
• Budgets — what the project or task is allowed to consume, tracked as a base amount plus dated changes with task-level caps.
• Actuals — cost derived from the time ledger: recorded hours multiplied by the rates in force.

Because actuals derive from the same append-only ledger the team already fills by working, the financial picture updates itself — there is no month-end reconstruction ritual.

The transactions ledger

Alongside the automatic time-derived figures, you can record income and expenses directly: invoices sent, payments received, costs incurred. Each transaction carries a status (draft, committed, invoiced, paid), a category, and links to clients, projects, tasks and payees. Settled transactions feed the money position on the Home dashboard, the Analytics money board and the financial reports — all computed from the same source.

Time off as a financial event

When time off is marked as paid, the person’s locked rate is used to compute the cost. That cost flows through to the Team page, the financial report, the Workload view’s paid-vs-unpaid split and the Analytics money board — so time away with pay is never missing from the financial picture.

Dual margins: delivery vs. money

PMOlikePRO deliberately tracks two margins side by side:

• Effort view — planned hours against hours actually spent.
• Financial view — budgeted money against actual cost.

A project can be on-budget in hours and off-budget in money (senior people doing junior work), or the reverse. Showing both keeps the conversation honest; blending them into one optimistic percentage is how projects surprise their owners.

Who sees the money

Financial data is the most sensitive thing in an operations tool, and it is treated that way:

• Rates, budgets and costs are visible to managers and admins.
• Members see the operational world — tasks, schedules, their own hours — with the money layer absent entirely.
• The gating happens server-side: financial figures are never delivered to a member’s session at all.

Reports that carry the story

Manager-level reports bring delivery and financials together — structured PDF and Excel exports with your organization’s branding, ready for a steering meeting or a client review, with archived engagements included when you want the full history. A complete workspace export includes every record as structured data plus every uploaded file, downloaded as one archive.

Where to go next

Roles, permissions & security explains the access model that makes this gating trustworthy. The Home dashboard shows how the money position and delivery scorecards appear as live widgets.