Why Your A&E Firm's 'Profitable' Projects Turn Unprofitable Halfway Through

The project looked profitable — until it wasn't. But too often, project managers are flying blind while relying on backward-looking spreadsheets and best guesses. We hear this all the time from growing firms: “We were 10% under budget halfway through—and then finished 12% over. What happened?”

The short answer: Your PM's didn’t have real-time visibility.

As outsourced finance and operations consultants, we help architecture, engineering, and consulting firms move from retrospective profitability to predictive insight. And the shift can radically improve not just margins — but confidence, culture, and growth.

The Core Problem: Profitability Isn't Monitored in Real Time.

Most A&E firms we meet are tracking project profitability like this:

• A spreadsheet updated by accounting a few weeks after the end of each month
• PMs only focus on project milestones and deliverables (not actual hours worked and dollars spent)
• No visibility into labor cost shifts, scope changes, or WIP overages

The result? Leaders are often blindsided — especially on longer projects where misalignment compounds over time.

The Strategic Risk of the Project Profitability Mirage

Here’s why that lag in profitability data matters:

• You keep greenlighting unprofitable project types
• PMs can’t course-correct until it’s too late
• You make hiring decisions based on faulty margins
• Your pipeline decisions aren’t backed by real data

In short: you’re scaling based on illusion, not insight.

How A&E Firms Can Improve Their Project Profitability Awareness

As outsourced partners, we help A&E firms shift from manual project reporting to integrated financial operations. Here’s what that looks like:

1. Real-time project cost tracking linked to timesheets, expenses, and billing

2. Dashboards that show earned value, burn rate, and margin to PMs and execs

3. Monthly close processes designed to flag profitability risk across your portfolio

This isn’t just better visibility — it’s better accountability. Project managers who understand margin become smarter resource allocators, scope negotiators, and client communicators.

If You Use BQE CORE: 3 Ways to Unlock Margin Awareness

BQE CORE is especially effective here because it integrates time, expenses, billing, and project budgets into one system. Here’s how we help firms make the most of it:

• Project Budget Alerts: We configure automated alerts that flag when budget and or contract value thresholds are crossed—helping PMs manage hours and costs before they spiral.

• Margin Dashboards: We set up visual dashboards that show project profitability in real-time by client, project, phase, or project manager. This helps leaders focus on the right projects — and avoid margin erosion.

• Earned Value Reporting: For firms with more complex delivery models, we build earned value reports inside CORE, helping clients compare planned vs. actual value delivered.

Go From Guess Work to Control

A 50-person design-build firm client of ours, was unknowingly underpricing 60% of its projects because they lacked a clear understanding of where their staff's time was actually being spent. After migrating their project tracking to BQE CORE and working with us on margin visibility, they reduced scope creep, they revised their pricing model, and saw a 15% bump in firm-wide profitability within the first 9 months.

Actionable Takeaways for A&E Firms: 

• Audit how you currently calculate project profitability. How often? Based on what?
• Identify three recent projects where actual margin didn’t match the forecast — what caused it?
• Give your PMs access to real-time margin data, even if it’s a simple burn chart.

You can’t grow what you can’t see. And for A&E firms, that means making profitability a weekly conversation — not a quarterly surprise. If you’re already using BQE CORE, you’re halfway there. We can help you connect the dots. If you are stuck in spreadsheets and want a demo of BQE CORE, we can help with that, too.

Stop Profit Leakage Before It Starts

Don't let another profitable project slip through the cracks. The difference between thriving A&E firms and struggling ones isn't just better project management — it's having the right systems expertly configured to deliver real-time insights when decisions matter most.

SPRCHRGR's BQE CORE implementation and optimization services transform your project tracking from guesswork to precision. Our tech-forward team doesn't just install software; we architect integrated financial operations that give you predictive visibility into every project's true profitability. From automated budget alerts to custom margin dashboards, we'll configure BQE CORE to work exactly how your firm operates. Ready to turn your project profitability from reactive to predictive? Schedule a call with us and discover how our expert BQE CORE setup can prevent your next profit surprise.