Updated on September 3, 2026
A utilization rate An average of 85% means absolutely nothing to a CFO looking to manage their gross margin. Conversely, a margin at completion means nothing to a project manager who has to decide this morning whether to replace a senior consultant with a junior one.
Stop overloading your teams with unnecessary KPI catalogs and regain control of your project margins. In this article, we've structured the essential KPIs according to your billing model (Time and Materials, Fixed Price, Subscription, Application Maintenance), and then organized a quick index by role.
🔎 Key takeaways about project management KPIs
- A project managed by the company loses money on days produced but never billed, a fixed-price project on the scope added without an amendment.
- The output produced but not invoiced represents 15 to 30% of the revenue of a project activity.
- A project that is 80% complete and 50% advanced is already drifting, without any deadlines having been missed.
- Subscription and TMA have neither closure nor deliverable: classic project indicators do not work there.
- A finance director compares three margins at the accounting close, a project manager tracks one on a weekly basis.
Why do standard KPIs and generic tools fail to measure project management KPIs?
The problem of IT Services And consulting firms don't see a lack of data as the problem, but rather the absence of the relevant indicator at the right time. Forcing teams to collaborate via spreadsheets or task management tools (like Trello or Asana) condemns your company to remain in the dark.
These tools ignore the financial dimension: a progress rate that increases as soon as a task is finished doesn't tell you whether the team spent 10 or 40 hours on the step. Furthermore, these industry-derived methods ignore scope creep and don't track real-time progress. resource planning planned. The classic evaluation criteria are no more helpful: sorting performance by quality, time and cost says nothing about how the project is billed.
Simply reducing the list of KPIs to the 12 most relevant financial indicators isn't enough; you also need to know which criteria to use for your decision. Indeed, a project managed on-site and a fixed-price project don't have the same warning signs because they don't recognize revenue in the same way.
What KPIs should be tracked for a project managed by a project manager?
In time and materials contracts, the main risk is not budget overruns, but unbilled work. Traditional KPI catalogs often mask "commercial gifts" and unbilled expenses because they don't compare recorded hours with their actual value.
You need to monitor production and invoicing in real time:
| Pre-sales and pricing | Production enhancement | The actual value produced, before invoicing |
| Production | Actual time vs. planned time | The days consumed outside resource planning |
| Billing | Still to be invoiced | Production delivered but not converted into cash |
In a project management context, which KPIs should be tracked during the cost estimation phase?
Monitor the gap between the ADR sold (fixed at signature) and the ADR real. If your tool does not report changes in resource planning In real time, this margin erosion remains hidden until the accounting balance sheet.
To effectively manage your projects, you must not see the gap between the ADR sold and the ADR real after the fact on a spreadsheet, but act upstream: re-arbitrate the resource planning or renegotiate the scope before validating the Activity Report (CRA).
In a production environment, which project KPIs should be monitored during production?
Since revenue is based on invoiced amounts, track unbilled production days daily. Every day worked outside the billing scope without prior agreement directly impacts your profitability.
The real risk is therefore not exceeding the budget, but everything that will constitute "commercial gifts" and expenses not billed back to the customer.
Monitoring KPIs for an outsourced project in Stafiz
Production value (time spent)
These figures allow the CFO to segment the value produced by sales model. In this example, negative margin rates do not signal a decline in activity, but rather months of intensive production for which billing milestones have not yet been triggered.
Actual time vs. planned time
This dashboard alerts you to over-consumption of time spent on-site. Stafiz compares actual working days with scheduled days in real time. Red cells show you at a glance the months when your teams are producing work days outside the budget. The manager is alerted instantly to stop the overrun or negotiate an amendment before the invoice is sent.
In a project management context, what KPIs should be monitored at the time of project closure?
When closing a project managed by a project manager, the main objective is to secure the final profitability, maximize billing for time worked, and accelerate payment collection. The key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor are:
- the remaining amount to be invoiced (RAF): what your teams have produced but which has not yet been invoiced to the client;
- Billing time (WIP Days): the average time it takes the client to pay project invoices after they are issued.
The remaining amount to be invoiced in Stafiz
Where traditional tools simply measure past revenue, this Stafiz dashboard calculates the exact amount remaining to be invoiced per customer, offering immediate visibility into foreseeable cash inflows.
What KPIs should be tracked for a project sold on a fixed-price basis?
With a fixed-price contract, the budget is sealed upon signing. Therefore, management must focus on absolute control of the scope to avoid scope creep and on predictive assessment of the final margin.
The 3 main indicators to monitor when managing a fixed-price project:
| Production | Progress compared to budget consumed | The drift before it becomes a loss |
| Fence | Margin to Termination | What the project will have yielded, estimated today |
| Transverse | Daily selling rate compared to actual rate | The actual price of each day produced |
Project costing: how to avoid destroying your profit margin?
Pricing a fixed-price assignment in a IT Services or a consulting firm covers five positions:
- the forecast time;
- the cost of this time ( ADR ) ;
- subcontracting purchases;
- costs that weigh on the margin that are not pass-through;
- purchases of products resold as part of the project.
With a fixed-price contract, it's impossible to correct a costing error in subcontracting or non-reimbursable expenses (unlike with a time and materials contract). No matter how perfectly your teams work, they'll only deliver a loss-making project that was unprofitable from the start.
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What KPIs should be tracked during the progress of a fixed-price project?
You have three KPIs to track:
- the percentage of project progress;
- the margin at the end;
- THE ADR Sold vs. actual.
The major risk is scope creep. Each additional customer request must generate an immediate amendment, as time tracking often reveals a rapid erosion of the ADR A real challenge in dealing with unforeseen demands. Every additional hour must immediately generate a commercial amendment, otherwise your gross margin will be destroyed.
Tracking KPIs for a fixed-price project in Stafiz
ADR sold vs. actual cost in Stafiz
Project progress tracking in Stafiz
This dashboard reveals the true health of a fixed-price project by comparing the Remaining Work (days consumed) with the resource planning forecast to calculate the progress) with the value created by the project.
Stafiz allows you to track your project progress using various methods:
- based on the time spent on the project (days used vs initial budget);
- project progress (number of validated milestones vs. billing);
- to the declared percentage of progress (management led by the project manager);
- to recognized revenue (actual value produced vs revenue).
Driving profitability through recognized revenue in Stafiz
Revenue recognition is not dependent on contractual milestones or billing dates, but on actual production effort. This tracking allows a financial director to calculate accrued revenue (or deferred revenue) and avoid distorting the company's financial results.
To learn more, we recommend reading our project monitoring guide .
What KPIs should be tracked on a project sold on a subscription basis (SaaS model or recurring service)?
The danger here is overdelivery: teams that over-deliver to avoid termination. This practice mainly concerns Professional Services providers managing post-deployment support.
This operating method specifically concerns the Professional Services departments or the integration services of a software publisher, and not the publisher as a whole.
Three indicators are key to managing a subscription.
| Set up | The same KPIs as on a fixed-price project , therefore the valuation of the production. | The actual value produced, before invoicing |
| Recurring monitoring | Recurring billing remains | The actual scope of the mission, and what needs to be billed in addition to or removed from the project. |
| Renewal | Rate of resource planning dedicated to recurring accounts | Invisible overdelivery carried out by your teams and overly time-consuming customer accounts. |
What project KPIs should be tracked when renewing a subscription?
Anticipate renewal to avoid renewing a contract at a loss where bad operational habits have decimated the actual margin.
- To avoid discovering the non-renewal at the moment it is finalized, and when there is no longer any possibility of negotiation.
- To avoid renewing a service subscription or support contract that has entrenched bad operational habits.
If your teams have spent the year overstaffing an account to compensate for product bugs or to reassure the client, your actual profit margin has already plummeted. Renewing this contract at the same rate means accepting a financial loss for the following year. To rectify the situation, the question remains: is it better to:
- increase the price of the monthly subscription;
- switch support to a strict Work Unit (WU) package where each additional hour is billed;
- reallocate your skills towards new, more profitable deployment projects.
What KPIs should be monitored for a TMA (Third-Party Application Maintenance)?
Third-party application maintenance, or TMA, is not a billing model, but a maintenance activity (the "run"). It refers to the handling by an external provider of the correction, evolution and support of an application already in production.
Between time-based support and SLA-based subscriptions, TMA requires hybrid management to prevent the actual workload from becoming completely disconnected from the billed workload.
Three indicators to monitor:
| Compliance with service level agreements (SLAs) | The contractual risk, the one that the client will raise against you |
| Ticket volume | The actual charge, unrelated to the amount billed |
| Average resolution time | The rising cost of handling an incident |
Which project KPIs should you look at depending on your role in the company?
Each role consults the same figures for different decisions. Here are your shortcuts to the metrics that matter to you.
What KPIs should you track when you are an Operations Leader (or Head of Delivery, Director of Operations)?
The Operations Leader is the person responsible for managing project execution, work organization, and team profitability on a daily basis within a company.
To bridge the gap between management strategy and the reality on the ground, it monitors the following KPIs:
- The task progress rate, which measures the progress of production compared to the initial schedule. The objective is to anticipate schedule deviations and secure project milestones;
- THE utilization rate and the completion rate, which allows him to understand how productive an individual or team is.
To refine the management of your operations, everything depends on the context of your company: your current project management tool , whether it integrates financial profitability indicators, whether your teams work in agile mode or in a V-cycle.
What project KPIs should you track when you are a Finance Director or Management Controller?
It secures overall financial health. Its focus: project profitability, cash flow, and revenue recognition.
- profitability and margins: whether it is the margin at completion, the difference between revenue and costs consumed to date, or the margin on direct costs;
- invoicing, cash flow and revenue recognition: projected vs actual revenue, work in progress (WIP) and customer payment terms;
- performance and pricing (fixed-price or time-and-materials model), which will depend on resource planning and the comparison between the actual ADR and ADR sold .
Note that for more than 20 employees we advise against using a spreadsheet like Excel, and recommend using software that gives you visibility between project management and budget and financial monitoring .
What KPIs should you track when you are a Project Manager?
As a Project Manager, performance management relies on three key KPIs (those often found in a fixed-price project ):
- the percentage of project progress;
- billing based on date vs recognized revenue;
- the difference between planned margin (initial budget) and projected margin (landing).
Depending on your sector of activity and the specific projects you work on (IT services company/ IT Services (construction, marketing, industry), the alert thresholds for these KPIs will vary.
What KPIs should you track when you are a General Manager or Business Unit (BU) Director?
For a position that has an overall view of the project portfolio, management relies on your ability to anticipate growth, secure the profitability of your company as a whole, and optimize the value of signed contracts.
The indicators you should pay the most attention to are:
- the projected revenue coverage rate, which indicates whether you need to adjust your prospecting efforts or revise your sales targets;
- the contribution margin per client, to analyze the real profitability of a portfolio of projects;
- the amendment rate, to measure the proportion of contracts modified: additional work, scope extensions, upselling.
What KPIs should you track when you are in Human Resources Management (HRM)?
To guide the human resources strategy and measure alignment with company objectives, a Human Resources Department (HRD) must monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) grouped around recruitment, team engagement, and... resource planning .
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What KPIs should you track when you're a software publisher?
For a software publisher (especially in the SaaS model), monitoring performance indicators is essential for driving growth and profitability. Recurring Revenue (MRR/ARR) and Recurring Outstanding Revenue (RAR) are the two key financial indicators for measuring the predictability of your revenue.
Choosing your project management KPIs comes down to deciding two questions:
- What is the billing method for the project?
- Who will read the key figure?
The list of KPIs to track, their frequency of review, and the decision to be made all depend on these two answers. The underlying condition, however, is the reliability of the times entered into the project management tool.
Frequently asked questions:
