How to See Which Clients and Projects Actually Make Money

Today we are covering how to see which clients are making money, automatically. If you run an agency, an accounting firm, any professional services firm or a law firm, this is really important, particularly if you're doing retainer-based or value-based pricing.

What we're going to cover today: why you need to be tracking profitability and margin, and the numbers that really matter when you're looking at profitability. Getting Rize set up to track this automatically, adding some automatic reports that help you stay on top of client profitability, and then turning that data into decisions and into repricing with clients. Then we'll open it up to Q&A.

This is for agency owners, accounting firm owners, professional services firm owners, anyone with fixed-fee, hourly or retainer clients. I think you'll get a lot of value out of this.

What you'll learn is how to see live client margins in Rize, how to catch clients if they're going over budget or if you're over-servicing, and how to review pricing or scope with clients based on that data. We'll also be sharing a playbook after this, with a profitability calculator and the prompts we used in these reports. This session is recorded. Feel free to drop questions in the Q&A.

This works with Rize. We're going to be showing Rize and going through how to do this in the UI. But you can also do this through the API, or through our MCP connector with ChatGPT or Claude. Rize can be the main source or one of many sources. This system should work with or without Rize. We want it to add value across the board.

If you have questions throughout this, just drop them in the Q&A. So let's get into it.

Why does revenue lie? A $10K retainer is going to look the same on revenue whether you've worked 40 hours or 90 hours on it. But your margin and your profitability are going to look very different. That's why it's so important, if you're running an agency, an accounting firm or a professional services firm, to track client profitability. This is the lifeblood of any service firm.

If you're only tracking revenue and you're not tracking time, then you're reactive and your margins are going to suffer. Retainers are going to run over, revisions and scope are going to pile up and creep, and you're going to be allocating resources inefficiently. Senior time is going to be spent on lower-margin clients.

When it comes to pricing, renewals and scope, you're operating on gut feeling. You don't have the underlying data to back you up in those conversations. That's what we're going to get into today.

A little stat: firm profitability has been falling. It's 9.9%, which is down from the five-year average of 13.8%. So this is really relevant to firms right now.

Why is it so hard? It comes back to getting the time data. Obviously we're biased, this is where Rize comes in. But a huge portion of profitability data, and the hardest to get, is labor cost: the time data. Right now firms are either not tracking it, or they're tracking their time manually. If you're tracking time manually, it's going to be inaccurate and it's going to add a ton of admin burden for the team. So you either have inaccurate data or no data at all.

The fix is to use Rize, or any automatic time tracker, and set up your clients and contracts in it so you can pull all of that data together and get live margins. You can get weekly reports that flag clients before they get completely over-serviced. And you can do monthly reviews to have those conversations about changing scope and price. That's what we're going to be building today.

What does good profitability visibility look like? It means you're proactive and data-driven. At any given moment you should have a dashboard where you can see exactly how much each client is paying you, how many hours you've worked for that client and on which projects, what your live margin is on those deals, and where it's heading. Are you on track? Are you going to go over? Are you over-servicing or under-servicing?

There are also metrics that really matter. Revenue after pass-through costs. Labor cost, which is hours times each person's cost rate. Delivery margin, which is revenue minus labor, divided by revenue. And your effective hourly rate. These are all shown in the Rize dashboard automatically once you're set up.

Parakeeto is another great source. We really rely on them, they're a great team, so check them out as well. We link to them in the playbook.

An example: you can have four clients on the same retainer, with very different profitability. This is a screenshot of the Rize dashboard. We're going to step through how to set this up in Rize. I'll do it through some slides first, then we'll get into the dashboard and I'll show you what it looks like.

The first step in Rize is to import your clients. You can do this through our API, our MCP, an integration like ClickUp, or through Claude or ChatGPT with the MCP. Or you can add them manually.

Once your clients are in, you set up your contracts. Contracts can be fixed fee, retainer or hourly, and you want to set one up for each client. Again, you can use the MCP to do this through Claude or ChatGPT, or use the UI. That's the revenue side.

Once you have that, you set your cost rates, and bill rates if you're doing hourly. For each team member, you set a cost rate. If they're salaried, their cost rate is roughly their annual salary divided by 52 weeks times 40 hours.

Once you're set up, the data starts rolling in. Rize automatically tracks time for each of your team members and automatically categorizes that time, and you immediately start to get live dashboards with margin and profitability. Then you can review all of this in reports, and take that data and turn it into insights and actions.

I'm going to share our demo environment and walk through a few of these steps so you can see it in the dashboard. I'll go through this quickly, but if you have questions, just let me know.

You can do this in the web browser or in the app. Under Work there's a Clients tab. Here you can add clients manually, or import them from a CSV or from ClickUp. The CSV import is a great way to batch-import clients. You can also connect Rize to Claude or ChatGPT with the MCP. I keep hammering this home because it's really powerful. You can import all your clients that way, or create a sync with any product we don't already have a direct sync with.

Once the clients are in, go to the Profitability tab. This is where we'll be hanging out a lot for this workshop. Underlying profitability are the contracts. You'll see the top contracts here, with profit, margin, budget, hours spent and status. On the Contracts tab you can see all of them: active, draft or paused.

If you click New Contract, you choose the contract type and the client. If you choose retainer, you enter the retainer amount, and you can optionally set a budget, either an hours budget or a revenue budget. You can also edit or archive client contracts here.

The next step is setting cost rates, and bill rates if you're doing hourly. The cost rate is roughly the hourly cost of that employee. You can set it differently per team if someone is on multiple teams, but normally most people are on one team with one cost rate.

Once that's set up, as you invite team members, their time is automatically tracked and categorized, and it starts rolling into the Tracked Time view. Say I want to group things by client and then by team member. I can do that here, and save it as a dashboard that's added to my favorites, so I can go back to it whenever I want.

What's really cool is that for these dashboards, I can create a report linked to the dashboard that pulls out insights, trends and analysis. In Reports, you can also create agentic reports from scratch. That's what we've done with the weekly client reports and monthly client reports, which we'll get into in a bit. But that's the first step: getting things set up.

Now let's talk about reports. Once the dashboard is set up and the data is flowing in automatically, what makes Rize really special is the intelligence layer. The Rize agent looks at your data. It can message you, build reports for you and pull out insights for you. Otherwise it's on you to go in and look at these dashboards every day. So we recommend setting up two reports.

The first is a weekly report on clients heading off track. You want to see any clients that might be on track to go over their retainer, or that could be blocked, or any anomalies or trends. This is really good for catching things before they go off track. We'll share the prompts for this.

Then you want a monthly report that does a deeper dive into each of your contracts and shows margin by client and trends: which clients you might need to have conversations with about rescoping or repricing. We'll also talk about how to have those conversations. These prompts are in the playbook too. One is more of a weekly check-in, and the other is higher level: what do we have to change in how we're running these client contracts, and who do we need to have conversations with.

Rize also has Routines, which are automations where you can do things like automatically send a client a report, a status update or a Slack message. We won't get too far into that today, but I want to call it out.

With Rize tracked time, you can also share reports with your clients as a PDF or CSV. This is really helpful for updates, and it makes you look really professional. It's also useful when you want to have those conversations about pricing or renewals.

Let's get back into the demo. First, the reports. These are some examples. This is one of the weekly capacity reports, fully generated by AI. You can do this with the Rize agent, or connect Claude or ChatGPT and have it do it for you. It calls out exactly who's working on what, a capacity snapshot, insights, what's on track and what's off, so you can act on it before it's too late.

We also have the monthly client profitability review. This is where you dive in deeper and understand: do we need to have a conversation about repricing or rescoping? Can we expand the work here? These are the more in-depth ones.

One other thing I want to call out is how to export time to a CSV or PDF to share with a client. In the Tracked Time view, set up the table and hit Export to PDF or CSV. It downloads immediately, or if it's a big time range, you'll get it by email.

With each of these reports, you can also chat with the report. If you want to dig in and ask questions, you can chat with the agent and ask what's going on and what else it recommends. You can also do this in Claude or ChatGPT, because the report is available through the MCP and the API.

Now that you have these reports, what do you do with the data? This is really important, and something we always call out in these workshops: the insights are worthless unless you take action. If a client's margins keep dropping, or the effective hourly rate isn't high enough, you can have either a repricing conversation or a rescoping conversation. Either you're doing too much work, or you need to be paid more.

If you see revisions piling up, that's a great opportunity to use Rize to see which workflows you should automate. You might also need to rethink how your processes run. You want to make sure you take the data and those reports and act on them. Otherwise it's throwaway.

One of the big things you can do is have the pricing conversation with your clients. You want to share the work that's been done, and that's where Rize comes in. You can export your data to PDF and CSV, get into the data with the client and say: we are spending way too much time on this, and this is why, this is what's taking so much time. Then you can ask: what is most important to you? Either we need to change the scope, like the number of revisions or how much work we're doing for you, or we need to agree on a new fee, or both.

If you go into that conversation without data, you're fighting an uphill battle. First, you don't even know whether the client is over-scoped. Second, you don't know which parts are over-scoped, and the client just has to trust you. So having the underlying data in Rize is really important.

This is also a great way to price new clients based on existing work. You can quote renewals and new proposals from work you actually did, and back them up with data. That means you're running a much more efficient and profitable firm.

We have some links we'll be sharing: the workshop playbook and the profit calculator. I'll send an email to everybody with all the follow-ups. I can open it up to Q&A. I want to apologize for the technical difficulties today. This is totally on us, and we're going to keep improving this process. Thank you.

Does anyone have any questions, anything about setup? Again, we'll be sharing this recording. I'm always happy to do a demo and help you get set up.

If you're interested in Rize and think it could be a good fit, you can book time on my Calendly. We're running these workshops every two weeks.

The playbook, good question. Go to rize.io, then Workshops, then Client Profitability, and the playbook is there. I'll drop it in the chat. If you're interested in booking a call, here's my Calendly, and I'm happy to talk through whether Rize is a good fit for you.

Our next workshop is all about agents, Claude, ChatGPT and MCP: how to automate project time tracking with Claude and ChatGPT. I'll share the link in the chat. We hope to see you there. As with all of these, we'll be recording the workshops and sharing the playbooks.

Thank you so much for joining, and again, apologies for the technical issues. It was a fun one to present. Thanks so much for joining today.