For any given item, you will be given a number of fields to describe its financial impact on the project. These can be seen below:
Qty/Hours describes the quantity of either hours or units that this Item represents.
Time Allocated will copy in the Hours from the Quantity/Hours field (if the Item Type is enabled for Track Time in the Item Types menu), and Time Spent will show all tracked time records against a given item.
Time Spent % is a percentage-based expression of Hours Allocated/Hours Spent.
Manual % is a field in which the assigned staff can describe current progress as a manually entered percentage.
The Rate $ field will allow you to enter both a Labour $ In (referring to staffing overhead costs) and Labour $ Out (referring to what you'll charge your clients) value, as seen below:
The Discount $ field can be used to express a discount in either percentage or fixed value forms. This will factor into the Profit field, which comes later.
The Tax % field is linked up to your Accounting Integration and is able to pull Tax Codes and values to be used against individual Items.
Total $ is a field that expresses the expected net revenue of a given task, your "before cost" total. This means it uses Time Allocated against your Labour $ Out Rate, as opposed to Time Spent.
Spent $ is looking at the portion of the Total $ field that has been incurred thus far. Because of this, we are measuring using the same rate (the Labour $ Out) however, we measure this against the Time Spent as opposed to Time Allocated.
Profit will look at your Total $ and remove any costs, like taxes, discounts, and your Time Spent against Labour $ In, aka staffing overhead costs.
Margins can be used to measure your current fiscal position against the expected return. They will require the use of the Manual Completion field, as this is vital to the projected calculations.
If your Time Spent is under your Time Allocated, but the Manual Completion % field exceeds that ratio (i.e. 60% of the Time Allocated has been used but the task is only 50% complete), you will see a projection in the margin field that reflects the cost of the extra labour beyond what was allocated.
Margin% refers to an Item's profit Margin. Your projection section will use the Manual Completion stat to tell you how far your existing Margins deviate from the projected ones.
This will then factor into your projected Profit field, where you will see a true reflection of profit based on current progress.