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A weekly project margin review is a standing meeting where every live job is read out against its money. Five figures per job, and three that matter most: hours burned against budget, margin to date against target, and forecast margin at completion. Thirty minutes. Every job, every week. Knowing how to run one is a question of agenda rather than tooling, because the figures already sit in your timesheets and nobody reads them until the job closes.
Most delivery teams already meet weekly. They cover blockers, resourcing and what the client said on Tuesday. Money rarely appears, and when it does it arrives as a feeling rather than a figure.
Because it was built to answer a different question. A status meeting asks whether the work is on track. A margin review asks whether the work is still worth the price you agreed, which needs different evidence and a different half hour.
Range's project review template makes the point by omission. An opening round. Notable updates and blockers. Discussion, planning for the week ahead, and a closing round.
Not one financial line anywhere in it. Every item on that agenda is a report on progress, and progress against a plan says nothing about what the progress cost to produce. A job can be on schedule, well received, and losing money on every hour booked to it.
Timing is the rest of the argument. Cost drift caught in week three is cheap to put right. Caught in the final fortnight, it cannot be put right at all. That is the reasoning behind the leading indicators that a job is losing money before it finishes. The weekly review is the meeting where somebody finally looks at them.
Five. Any longer list stops being read aloud and becomes an attachment nobody opens.
| Number | Where it comes from | The point it becomes an action |
|---|---|---|
| Hours burned against budgeted hours | Timesheets against the estimate | Burn runs more than 10 points ahead of completion |
| Margin to date against target | Recorded cost against quoted value | Below target two weeks in a row |
| Unpriced change requests | The change log | Any request open longer than seven days |
| Days to the next milestone | The delivery plan | Milestone inside a fortnight with work outstanding |
| Forecast margin at completion | Current burn rate extended to the end date | Below the margin you would refuse the job at |
The last row carries the meeting. Margin to date is history, and history is only useful for the next quote. Forecast margin at completion is the one figure that describes a future you can still change. It is also the one most teams cannot produce without half a day in a spreadsheet.
The second row needs a target worth comparing against. A blended percentage inherited from a pricing conversation two years ago will not do. Calculating the effective hourly rate on a fixed fee project gives the target a rate behind it, which is what makes the comparison mean something.
When it crosses a line you agreed before the meeting. Thresholds get set in advance precisely so they are not negotiated in the room by whoever most wants the project to look healthy.
By reading exceptions, not the portfolio. Every live job gets a row in the pack. Only the jobs that breached a threshold get airtime, and the pack goes out the evening before so nobody presents numbers everyone can already see.
Sixteen minutes of exceptions sounds thin until you try it. Three or four projects will breach something in a normal week, and four minutes each is enough when the cause is already on the page.
One named person per breach, with a date, recorded while everyone is still in the room. Not the team. Not the meeting.
Split ownership by what the action needs. A change request needs somebody who can hold a commercial conversation with the client: the account lead, not the delivery lead. Resequencing hours needs whoever controls the resource plan. Mis-booked time and wrong rates belong to whoever owns the timesheet data. Cheapest fix of the three, that last one.
The failure mode is easy to recognise. A number gets discussed, everyone agrees it looks bad, and the agenda moves on. It reappears the following week, worse. Two identical conversations about the same overrun mean the first one had no owner.
Sometimes, deliberately, and never by default. Over-servicing is a commercial choice with a price on it. The weekly review is where that choice gets made in the open, rather than at six o'clock on a Thursday by whoever happened to take the call.
Upsourced Accounting's guidance on evaluating project margin puts a healthy project gross margin between 50% and 70%. Anything under 40% it treats as a red flag: the job was underpriced, over-delivered, or both. It points the over-serve judgement at a weekly delivery meeting with project management leadership. Same cadence, near enough the same room.
Retainers work the same way with a shorter fuse. Enterprise DNA's guide to preventing retainer scope creep locates the decision at the moment the request arrives, not at invoice time. That is the moment the account manager has three other fires burning and says yes. A weekly review will never catch that request on the day. It will catch the pattern by the following Monday, early enough to reprice the rest of the month.
Granularity, mostly. Marcel Petitpas of Parakeeto frames the choice in his discussion of how to track time in an agency. Pick your level of detail by asking what you would want to investigate when things do not go to plan. If your time data cannot say which deliverable absorbed the hours, the meeting can establish that a job is over budget and nothing else.
Two habits make the difference:
Korrel's project analytics carry these figures directly: budget consumed, cost variance, planned against actual margin, forecast at completion, and billable against non-billable hours. The portfolio dashboard adds a queue of projects needing attention, with a recommended next action beside each. Views you open, not alerts that arrive. Which is exactly why the cadence matters. The rest of the cost tracking coverage deals with the mechanics underneath the meeting.
Do not build a dashboard first. Take the five columns above into the delivery meeting you already hold, give the last ten minutes of it to money, and write down every project you cannot answer for. That list is your real data problem, and it will tell you more than any tooling decision you could make this quarter.
Then set the thresholds. Agree them once, with the person who signs off pricing, and hold them for a full quarter before revising. Thresholds that move whenever a project breaches one are just opinions with numbers attached.
COMMON QUESTIONS:
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