Knowing that Soap Factory's Rebranding brought in 50,000 answers half the question. The other half is what those hours cost your operation — and that's what the hourly cost brings. With it, Profitability stops showing only revenue and starts showing margin.
Team cost and margin are part of the Enterprise plan.
Data with an owner
Hourly cost is, in practice, exposed salary. That's why it starts closed: only the account owner sees and edits that value. Admins still see price, revenue and profitability — but not cost or margin.
If you want to open the reading to admins, there's the Admins see cost and margin switch under Workspace. It grants reading only: creating and editing cost remains the owner's alone, because whoever touches payroll is whoever answers for it.
Where to set it
On the Team list, in the Cost/hour column, next to the billable rate column. They're two independent numbers: one is what the client pays for the hour, the other is what that hour costs you.
Cost follows the same inheritance logic as the hourly rate — the person, with the workspace default as the base. And, like the rate, it's frozen at the moment the hour is tracked: a raise in September doesn't rewrite the cost of August's hours.
How margin is calculated
Margin is revenue minus cost, and the percentage is margin over revenue. There's a deliberate asymmetry between the two sides, and it's the main point of this article:
Revenue counts only billable hours (or the contract amount, depending on the billing model).
Cost counts every hour — billable and non-billable.
That's not a technical detail: it's the whole lesson of the screen. The non-billable hour is exactly the one that costs and doesn't earn. If your agency runs 30% internal hours, that doesn't show in revenue and shows in full in cost — which is the explanation for why a "well sold" project closes on a thin margin.
When margin shows as not calculable
Rather than show a wrong number, the system says it doesn't know. The cases:
There are hours with no cost set. Partial cost would produce an optimistic margin that looks exact.
There are hours with no rate, on hourly projects. On fixed-fee and retainer projects revenue comes from the contract, so the margin is still valid.
Revenue isn't calculable — a project with no billing model, no agreed amount or no start date. The reason is written on the row.
Revenue is zero. The margin exists (it's the cost, negative), but the percentage doesn't: there's nothing to calculate it over.
On the customer row, if one of their projects is incomplete, the whole customer's margin is flagged as partial. Adding what's complete to what's half-done would return a number that looks like the total — and that total is what decides whether the contract is renewed.
Where cost does NOT appear
Cost doesn't come out in reports, exports, the timesheet or email. Not even in budget alerts. It lives on the Profitability screen and in the Team column, and it only leaves there for those with permission. An email carrying a cost figure would be a leak channel bypassing all of that protection.
If you change plans
Moving down to a plan that doesn't include cost, nothing is deleted. The values you entered stay saved and come back if you subscribe to the higher plan again. What you lose is access to the feature, not the data.
Where to go next
Setting the hourly rate — the other side of the equation.
Profitability and budget — where margin is read.
Workspace settings — the switch that opens cost to admins.
Invitations and roles — who is owner and who is admin.
In short: set the hourly cost on the Team screen; it's the owner's alone unless you open the reading to admins; margin is revenue minus cost, where revenue counts only billable hours and cost counts all of them; and when cost or rate is missing, the system says it doesn't know instead of inventing a number.