Home Marketplace Profitability Planner
Which projects
actually made money?
Six Excel sheets that answer what a bank balance can't. Project profit after real hours, client profit including the unbilled admin, utilisation week by week, how much work you can honestly take on, and what has to change to hit your target income. 432 live formulas, currency-neutral, no macros.
Instant download · Commercial licence, unlimited use · Free updates for life · 7-day refund
Actual sheets
Not a screenshot of a template.
The real workbook.
Three sheets from the file, showing the figures its own formulas produce on the sample data it ships with.
The problem
Your bank balance
is not a profit report.
Money came in this month. Some of it was a deposit for work not started. Some was the final payment on a project that ran 40% over. Some was a retainer from a client who takes nine hours of "quick questions" you never invoiced. It nets to a number that tells you nothing about whether any of it was worth doing.
Most freelancers find out a project lost money about eleven months after it did — if at all. This finds out in twenty minutes.
Not — an accounting package
What's inside
Six sheets, in the order
you'd actually use them.
Setup — what an hour of your time really costs
Eight numbers, five minutes. Produces your true cost per hour — not your salary divided by 2,080, but your target take-home plus business costs plus tax set-aside, divided by the hours you can realistically sell. On the shipped defaults that's 54.35 an hour before any profit, which is usually 40–60% higher than people assume.
Time — 5 minutes
Project profit — did this one actually pay?
One row per finished project. Revenue, true cost from real hours, margin, effective hourly rate, and a verdict. Plus the figure almost nobody calculates: your average hours overrun against quote. If that's consistently above 20%, your estimates are the problem — and no price rise fixes an estimate that's wrong.
Flags — losses and thin margins
Client profit — which relationships are worth keeping
A 12-month view with a column for admin and comms hours. It also calculates concentration risk: if one client is more than 40% of your revenue, you don't have a business, you have a job with a single employer who can end it without notice.
Utilisation — where the week actually goes
Worked hours against billed hours, week by week, and what the gap costs in real money. 50–65% is normal for a solo operator; anyone claiming 80% isn't counting proposals, invoicing, or the calls that went nowhere.
Capacity — and the floor price for new work
Capacity isn't hours in a week. It's hours times utilisation, minus what's already committed. The sheet produces a minimum price a new project must carry to be worth doing — below it, turning the work down is the profitable choice, because taking it costs you the capacity to take something better.
Break-even — which of the three levers to pull
The gap between the day rate you need and the one you charge, and what each lever is worth: rate (strongest, and the one people avoid), utilisation (hard ceiling), costs (weakest unless genuinely bloated).
Who it's for
Anyone who bills
by the project.
Freelance designers & developers
You quote fixed prices and suspect some of them lose money. This tells you which ones.
Small studios
Two to ten people, where nobody has time to build a model but everyone feels the squeeze.
Consultants on retainers
The client who pays most is very often not the client who earns you most.
Not a fit if you bill purely hourly with full utilisation and no fixed-price risk — most of the value here is in the gap between quoted and actual.
Honestly
What this isn't.
Not financial or accounting advice. It's a framework for looking at your own numbers. It doesn't know your tax position, your market or your obligations, and it hasn't been reviewed by an accountant. The tax and pension percentage in sheet 1 drives every other figure — get that one from a professional rather than guessing.
No integrations. It doesn't connect to Xero, QuickBooks or your bank. You type the numbers in, and that's deliberate: the act of entering real hours is where the insight comes from.
Built for one person or a small team. Above about five people you'll want per-person utilisation rather than one blended figure.
Isn't — accounting software
Questions
Before you buy.
How do I know if a freelance project actually made money?
Compare revenue against your true cost per hour multiplied by the hours you actually worked, including the ones you never invoiced, plus anything you paid out. Healthy is 25–40% margin on fixed-price project work; below 20% you have no buffer for the one project a year that goes wrong. The figure that tells you which problem you have is hours overrun against quote — if that is consistently above 20%, your estimates are wrong rather than your prices.
What is a good utilisation rate for a freelancer?
50–65% is normal for a solo operator. Anyone claiming 80% is generally not counting proposals, invoicing, admin, or the calls that went nowhere. Under 50% means you are running a sales and admin business that occasionally does client work — either price for that or remove the admin. Pushing much past 70% solo tends to empty your pipeline, because the pipeline is built in the unbilled hours.
How do I work out my true cost per hour?
Add your target take-home income, your business costs and your tax and pension set-aside, then divide by the hours you can realistically sell — working weeks times working days times billable hours per day, which is about six of an eight-hour day, not eight. It is almost always 40 to 60 per cent higher than people assume, because salary divided by 2,080 ignores costs, tax and the unbillable half of the week.
How many clients can I actually handle at once?
Take your billable hours per week, multiply by your real utilisation, and subtract what is already committed to live projects. What is left is your genuine spare capacity. The workbook then produces a minimum price for any new project — your cost per hour times the estimated hours plus a 30% margin. Below that figure, declining the work is the profitable choice, because accepting it costs you the capacity to take something better.
Does it work in my currency?
Yes. The workbook is currency-neutral by design — no symbol appears anywhere, so the figures work in whatever you bill in. Just stay consistent and do not mix currencies within one workbook. There are no macros either, so it opens safely in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers and LibreOffice.
How is this different from the Web Agency Toolkit's pricing calculator?
The toolkit's calculator answers "what should I charge?" before the work. This answers "did it work?" afterwards, and "how much can I take on?" next. They share one input — your cost base — and otherwise do different jobs. If you own the toolkit, this is the sheet that tells you whether its pricing advice actually held.
Twenty minutes. Three uncomfortable answers.
Instant download. Commercial licence, unlimited use. Free updates for life. Seven-day refund if it isn't useful.
Launch price · Going to $39 after the first 20 sales
Price the work before you measure it
This planner tells you whether a price held. The Web Agency Toolkit sets it in the first place — contracts, a statement of work with the exclusions that stop scope creep, and a pricing calculator. Or read what an hour of your time really costs first.