Accurate financial tracking is essential to the successful delivery of any project. Whether you’re managing billable client work or internal initiatives, visibility into revenue, costs, and profit margins helps ensure that your projects stay on budget and contribute to your bottom line. Mission Control’s Project Financials feature gives you all the tools you need to monitor and manage the financial performance of your projects—right from within the Salesforce Platform.
This powerful functionality enables you to calculate financial data at the Action, Milestone, and Project level, giving you real-time insights into profitability. With flexible billing and cost rate options, detailed time tracking, and built-in calculations for revenue and cost values, Project Financials makes it easy to stay in control of your budgets and margins.
In this Feature Focus, we’ll take a closer look at what Project Financials is, highlight its key capabilities, and walk you through how to use it within your projects.
What is the Project Financials feature in Mission Control?
The Project Financials feature in Mission Control is designed to help businesses track the revenue and costs associated with a project, allowing for accurate visibility into profit and loss at various levels of granularity. Whether you’re looking at individual Actions, larger Milestones, or the overall Project, this feature calculates and presents financial data based on your configuration and time tracking inputs.
Before diving into the detail of Actions and assigning work, it’s important to ensure that all the project-level billing and cost information is set up. This is because financial calculations begin as soon as Actions are created. By establishing the right billing structure upfront—whether it’s standard, role-based, skill-based, or driven by a rate card—you’re laying the groundwork for accurate financial reporting throughout the life of the project.
Mission Control then uses this billing configuration to calculate hourly billing and cost rates. These calculations can be tailored to match your operational model, with flexibility to adjust based on job roles, individual skillsets, or predefined rate cards. This ensures that your Project Financials reflect the reality of your delivery structure, supporting more accurate forecasting, billing, and margin analysis.
Key Features of the Project Financials in Mission Control
One of the most powerful aspects of Project Financials is its flexible billing and cost rate structure. Mission Control offers four different ways to calculate hourly rates: Standard, Role-based, Skill-based, and Rate Card. Standard rates are defined at the project level, while Role-based rates pull data from individual Role records. Skill-based rates allow you to track costs based on the skills required to complete an Action, and Rate Cards provide function- and skill-specific rates that apply across roles and date ranges.
Another key feature is real-time revenue and cost calculation. As team members log time against Actions, the system automatically calculates billable and cost values. It distinguishes between billable and non-billable time, using a ‘Non Billable Indicator’ flag on the Time Log to ensure only appropriate hours are counted towards revenue. Costs, however, are calculated for all hours, providing a clear picture of the full resource investment in a project.
Mission Control also includes profit and loss (P&L) tracking at the Action, Milestone, and Project level. This enables you to drill down and see exactly where revenue is being earned and costs are being incurred. With financial insights available for scheduled, completed, and remaining hours, you can analyze your actuals against projections and make informed decisions about future resource allocation or scope adjustments.
How to use the Project Financials in Mission Control
To begin using Project Financials, the first step is to set up the billing and cost settings at the project level. This includes choosing your preferred billing rate method and entering the appropriate daily rates, which are automatically converted into hourly rates based on your ‘Hours per Day’ setting. From there, every Action created under the project will inherit these financial parameters, ensuring consistent and accurate calculations.
As your team logs time against Actions, Mission Control tracks billable and non-billable hours. When logging time, if the ‘Non Billable Indicator’ is set to FALSE, those hours are counted as billable and factored into the revenue calculation. Conversely, if the indicator is TRUE, the time is marked as non-billable and only contributes to the cost calculation. This provides a detailed picture of how much of your team’s time is revenue-generating versus internal or pro bono work.
If you make changes to your financial settings after Actions have been created, or if you want to refresh calculations based on updated data, you can trigger a financial recalculation by setting the ‘Force Financials Recalculation’ field on the Project to TRUE. This ensures all financial values are accurate and up to date, reflecting the latest structure and time entries. There’s also a built-in Validation Rule to prevent billable hours from being entered against time logs flagged as non-billable, helping maintain data integrity.
Conclusion: The Benefits of Tracking Project Financials
The Project Financials feature in Mission Control delivers powerful, real-time insight into the financial performance of your projects. By accurately capturing revenue, cost, and profit margins, you can keep projects on budget, ensure fair and accurate billing, and make strategic decisions to protect profitability. With support for multiple rate structures and detailed time tracking, Project Financials offers flexibility that matches the complexity of modern service delivery.
Beyond just tracking costs, this feature provides a complete view of your project financial health, empowering your project managers and leadership teams with the data they need to operate efficiently. Whether you’re delivering consulting services, software development, or creative design projects, having this level of financial transparency can transform how you manage and deliver value to clients.
In today’s competitive landscape, understanding your project economics isn’t just nice to have—it’s essential. Mission Control’s Project Financials makes that understanding easy, actionable, and deeply integrated into your day-to-day project management workflows.
Mission Control is a comprehensive Salesforce Project Management software application. Make sure you check out our other Project Management Best Practices.
