Manage the profitability of your business to ensure its long-term future

To ensure the long-term future of a business, you need to check that it is profitable. Except that the task is not as easy as it seems. In the case of a service company that charges a fixed price for its services, this can sometimes take longer than expected. So what are the means available to us to ensure satisfactory margins? And more generally, what are the solutions that can help us stay on course? Find out all our advice on how to use time management in business.

Get a clear picture of the profitability of your projects

As you can see, the first thing to do is not to navigate blindly. And the most important thing is to know exactly which projects or assignments are profitable and which are less so.
Analysing the profitability of an assignment is one thing. But the important thing is to know what the net margin is. This will help you to get as close as possible to your profitability target in future negotiations with clients.

To take a concrete example, for a service company such as a communications agency, this involves a number of things:

• listing the various expenses relating to the project: materials, external service provider, advertising space, etc.
• knowing and calculating the hourly cost of each of the company's employees
• keeping track of the time spent on the project in question, either simply using a timesheet system that each employee fills in regularly, or using time-tracking software that will optimise the process and save you a lot of tedious and unrewarding work.

These operations give you a precise view of costs and therefore of the margin generated on each assignment carried out. To help you do this, there are a number of effective software solutions that will save you a great deal of time. Evizience software, for example, is a simple time tracking and profitability analysis tool designed specifically for advertising agencies and communications consultancies.

Concentrate your efforts on the right customers

Once you have the data you need to know the margin generated on each of your projects, you can easily find out the profitability of your various clients.

It's important to have a clear and precise picture of which customers are driving your business into the red and which are keeping it going! This will help you, for example, to target your sales efforts on those customers who will make your business flourish. Thanks to Evizience, you can obtain this data very easily, in a summary dashboard.

Detect the activities that are penalising your profitability

In the same way, with a tool like this, it's just as easy to track the time spent on the different components of a project: the different deliverables for the same project, or the different types of work to be carried out on the project, for example.

This will enable you to see exactly which stages are slowing down the project, or which part has taken longer than expected. With these elements in hand, you'll find it easier to draw up a reliable estimate, knowing which activities and jobs are going to take you a long time to complete.


In conclusion, it's important to understand that implementing a time tracking process to analyse the profitability of your projects and your customers will require a certain amount of effort on your part, whether it's to explain the objective of the operation to your employees or to make them understand it.However, the adoption of a time tracking system is a good way of ensuring that your employees are motivated throughout the process.However, adopting a suitable time management software solution will guide you through this process and provide you with the essential framework for the success of such a project.