Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

I spent years managing client services teams before I joined Teamwork.com, and software implementation projects were always the ones that kept me up at night. A go-live date would slip, a consultant would get double-booked across two rollouts, and the billable hours nobody logged would quietly eat the margin. Most of that chaos came from running implementations across a spreadsheet, a time tracker, and a separate billing tool that never talked to each other.

How Rippling and Xero AU payroll integrations eliminate the manual work from every pay cycle.

To be clear from the outset: this guide is about reserving people and time for probable client work, not building oil and gas pipelines. If you plan projects for a living, "pipeline" means the deals moving toward a yes, and the work you'll have to staff the moment one lands. According to Teamwork.com's own product data, only 42% of expected work is mapped to a plan before it's confirmed, which leaves a lot of resourcing to guesswork.

Monday morning shows up, your calendar's already full of meetings, and your to-do list is quickly turning into a novel. You know what needs doing, but what you don't have is fifteen free minutes to figure out when. That's the gap our AI Teammate, Scout, just stepped in to fill. Meet Plan my week, Scout's newest job and the fastest way to turn a pile of tasks into an actual, workable schedule.

There's a Reddit thread that's currently ranking for this exact topic, and the whole premise is that project profitability is "basically a guess." I get why people feel that way. But forecasting profit before you start isn't fortune-telling, it's a repeatable calculation you can run on any project in about an hour. This guide walks through the five-step method I used in my agency days to predict a project's margin before a single hour is logged.

Before I joined Teamwork.com, I directed client accounts at agencies, and the most uncomfortable meeting of every month was the profitability review. We'd pull time out of one tool, costs out of another, and rates out of a spreadsheet someone updated when they remembered to. By the time the numbers lined up, the project was already over, and so was any chance to fix it. That's the real problem with most "profitability tracking." It tells you what happened after you can't do anything about it.