Target margins
Write down once what a good margin looks like, for the business and per kind of work, so every page can tell you whether a number is good.
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.
When you raise a line on a draft proposal from under its target to at or above it, the product records the raise, and when the proposal is first sent it counts on the owner’s Billing page as Priced up to target before it was sent — see what SMG Tools caught. A raise counts only while the line is still at its target when the proposal goes out, and never for more than the raise itself. It is measured against the target the line was raised to — its kind of work’s, else the business’s — so changing a target later changes nothing already counted, and the proposal’s history shows Priced a line up to its target margin where it happened.
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.
This page describes Target Margins. It is written from that feature’s record and covers what has shipped, never what is planned.