Target margins

Which kinds of work make money tells you what each kind of work made. It cannot tell you whether that is good, because nobody has told the product what good is.

An owner who knows water heaters should run forty percent reads 41% and relaxes, reads 32% and worries — and until you write that judgment down, the product has no part in either.

Set the business target

Your organization has one target margin, and it always has: the percentage the proposal costing uses to color line items. It starts at 25% until you change it.

You will find it on the Margin Intelligence settings beside the alert thresholds, and on your organization’s details.

Override it per kind of work

Any job type may set its own target.

This is where it earns its keep, because a business rarely has one honest number. Service calls, new installs and warranty work are different propositions, and holding them to one figure means two of the three are being judged by a standard that was never meant for them.

A kind of work with no target of its own uses the business target.

Where the target then shows up

Once set, every place a margin is shown can say whether it is ahead or behind — the proposal you are pricing, the job you are running, and the report you read at the end of the quarter.

That is the difference between a dashboard of numbers and a dashboard that tells you something.

Pick a number you would actually act on

A target is a decision, not an aspiration. The useful one is the margin below which you would change something — reprice the work, scope it differently, or stop taking it.

A target nobody would act on turns every page amber and teaches you to ignore the color.