Insights is the read-back. Everything on it is built from what your firm has already recorded — the hours people logged, the invoices you raised and the payments that arrived — so it is a view of your own data rather than a separate thing to maintain. It is plain arithmetic: nothing on the page is a forecast, and nothing on it is written by an assistant.

Choosing the period

Time range sets what everything is measured over: This year, Last 12 months, or All time. It is the only period control on the page — no card carries its own.

Last-12-months is usually the more useful of the two shorter ones. A calendar year in January is four weeks of evidence and tells you very little.

Three things deliberately ignore the range, and each says so in its own sentence: anything about unpaid invoices is as of today (an invoice from last year that is still open is still owed), the per-job cards on Work cover each job's whole life — see below — and the watchlist strip at the top of Overview is where things stand now, with one exception it names itself.

The four tabs

• Overview — the whole firm. What came in, what went out in wages, what is still owed to you, and where the month stands against its target.
• Clients — the same money per client, which is where the uncomfortable numbers live. A client you like is not necessarily a client who pays for the time they take.
• Team — where the hours sit: by person, by service, and month by month. Workload, not performance.
• Work — each job against the hours you planned for it and the fee you charged for it.

Overview — the firm at a glance

This month against target is the top line: what you have billed so far this month against the monthly target, with a tick for how far through the month you are. On pace for {amount} is the one projection on the page — this month's billing so far, stretched to the end of the month in a straight line, and always labelled as such. Collected sits beside it because billing an invoice and being paid for it are two different days.

Below it, four cards, each answering one question:

• Revenue collected — payments that actually arrived in the period, net of anything refunded. Money in the bank, not invoices issued.
• Hours logged — every hour recorded in the period, client work and the firm's own work together. The split between the two is shown once, lower down.
• Estimated margin — revenue collected minus what the hours cost in wages. See What Estimated means below.
• Collected per client hour — collected money divided by the client hours logged. It is what an hour brought in, not a rate anybody charges, and it stays blank until there are ten client hours behind it.

What needs a look is a short strip of counts, each one a link into the tab that explains it: Clients in the red, Jobs under 80% realization, Jobs over budget, Open jobs with hours but no plan, and Live jobs past their due date. One sentence under the strip carries the scope for all five — As things stand today. Job counts cover each job's whole life, not the period above — only clients in the red follows it. — so the period you pick moves the first count and leaves the rest where they are.

The charts read the same way. Revenue by month shows billed and collected side by side, with the target line drawn over billed only, and a footnote giving the typical number of days between issuing an invoice and being paid for it once there are enough paid invoices to say. Collected vs labor cost puts wages under what came in, month by month; a month in which nobody had a cost rate is a gap in the cost line, not a zero. Client work vs firm's own work is the share of every logged hour that went to a client rather than to running the firm, with three figures beside it — Hours on firm's own work, Labor cost on firm's own work and Internal projects with hours — and Hours by month stacks the two. Unpaid by age sorts what you are owed into not-yet-due and how late the rest is, as of today. Collected per client hour, by month is the fourth card above drawn over time, and a month under ten client hours is left blank rather than drawn from too little.

The "After Vylan subscription" switch

After Vylan subscription sits beside the tabs, not inside any card, because it moves two numbers together: the Estimated margin card and the cost line on Collected vs labor cost both take the firm's subscription for the months in range off the top, and while it is on that line is relabelled Labor cost + Vylan subscription so you can see which version you are reading. With it on, the two agree with each other; with it off, they agree with each other. It never moves one of them alone.

It only appears when your firm is actually paying for Vylan. On a trial, or after a cancellation, the subscription is nothing — and a switch that subtracts nothing would be a control that promises to change a number and does not.

What "Estimated" means

The word Estimated sits beside a figure that a rate card produced rather than a payment, and it says which arithmetic that particular figure used. There is no single house meaning: hover it and you get the sentence for the number it is attached to. Revenue collected, hours logged and any count never carry it — those are facts, and marking them would be noise.

• A margin — Estimated margin on Overview, Lowest margin and Clients in the red — is revenue collected minus labor cost. Rent, software, insurance and the rest of the firm's overhead are not in it, so it is the margin on the work, not the profit of the firm.
• A cost — the cost line on Collected vs labor cost, the wages on the firm's own work, and Costliest to serve — is the hours logged priced at each person's cost rate.
• A value — Most billable value — is the hours logged priced at each person's billable rate. It is what the work was worth, never what a client was charged.
• Two different realizations, which is why they never share a sentence. Lowest realization on Clients divides what a client paid in the period by what that period's hours were worth. What jobs charged vs. what the hours were worth on Work divides a single job's fixed fee instead.
• Collected per hour, by client draws two per-hour rates over two different denominators — collected money over every logged hour, the comparison over rated hours only — and says so on the card.

Whichever figure it is, hours logged before that person had the rate in question carry nothing at all. They are left out and counted in a footnote rather than folded in at zero, so any of these estimates is a ceiling on the true number, never a figure to the dollar.

Clients — who pays for the time they take

Client book is the strip across the top: clients with hours, clients in the red, how much of your revenue the top three clients represent, clients on retainer, and how many clients came and went in the period.

Revenue collected vs effort plots every client with hours: what they took across the bottom, what they paid up the side. The bottom-right corner is the one to look at, and the plot names it — High effort · low revenue. Clients in the red is the shortlist of clients whose wages exceeded what they paid, worst first. It is always revenue collected minus labor cost whichever effort lens is on, and the card says so rather than leaving you to wonder why it did not move.

Show effort as — Hours, Cost or Billable — changes what "effort" means on this tab. Hours is time. Cost is that time at cost rates. Billable is that time at billable rates, which is what you would have invoiced for it by the hour. The choice moves four cards at once, titles and all: the plot's bottom axis, the effort ranking (Most hours consumed, Costliest to serve or Most billable value), the ranking beside it (Lowest margin under Hours and Cost, Lowest realization under Billable) and the per-hour chart. Highest revenue never moves — collected money is collected money whichever way effort is measured. Under Cost or Billable, a client whose hours carry no rate is left off the chart and counted in a footnote rather than drawn at $0.

Collected per hour, by client is what an hour of work for each client actually brought in, in that order; clients under ten hours in the period are left out and counted underneath. Under Cost or Billable it draws a second bar beside each one — Cost per hour or Billable value per hour — over a different denominator, and the card says so: Collected ÷ all hours; the comparison ÷ rated hours only.

Unpaid by client is who owes you money right now — as of today, not the range. It is a read-back, not a collections tool; chasing an invoice happens where the invoice lives, in recording a payment.

Team — workload, not performance

This tab shows where the hours sit so nobody has to guess. It does not rank people, it puts no target on anyone, and nobody is ever coloured red. People are ordered by hours only because a chart needs an order.

Where hours went gives each person one number: the share of the hours they logged that was client work rather than the firm's own work. It is a share of logged hours, not of a working week — Vylan does not know anybody's contracted hours, so nothing here says whether someone is busy or free. A person who logged nothing in the period simply has no ring; the tab never shows a 0%.

Hours by team member and Hours by service are the two totals. Who works on what crosses the two — each cell is one person's hours on one service, darker for more — which is the quickest way to see a service that depends on a single person. Hours by month, per person shows how each person's load moved through the period, one small chart each, on the same scale.

Work — jobs against their plan and their price

One rule to hold in mind, and the tab says it in its first line: the per-job figures — over budget, jobs with no plan, budget against actual, and what a job charged against what its hours were worth — cover each job's whole life, not the period above. A budget and a fee belong to the entire job, so slicing them by month would be nonsense. Only the By service table at the bottom follows the range, and its columns say so.

Work at a glance counts the jobs swept, how many carry a planned budget, how many are Under 80% realization and how many were Delivered on time. Below it:

• Over budget — jobs whose hours have passed their plan, furthest over first. A job with no planned hours cannot be over a plan, so it is not counted here; it is counted in Open jobs with no plan instead. Overruns are shown per job and never added up.
• Budget vs actual — every job with a plan and some hours, planned across and actual up. The diagonal is "landed on plan"; above it is over.
• What jobs charged vs. what the hours were worth — the fee on the job against its hours at billable rates. Under 100% means the fee came in below the value of the time: the list to reprice. Jobs with an hourly line, no fee, no rated hours, or a recurring fee are not rated — a retainer's fee is per period, not a one-time total, so comparing it with lifetime hours would call every retainer a loss.
• Realization spread and Realization by service · lifetime — the same fee-against-worth comparison as a distribution, and rolled up per service line, so one badly priced job is not mistaken for a badly priced service.
• Past their due date — live jobs whose due date has gone by, and by how many days. This is where the watchlist's past-due count leads.
• By service — for each service line: jobs completed in the period, their average actual hours, how many of the budgeted ones went over, the median days from start to done, and how many finished by their due date.

Two cut-offs you will see

Some cards use a threshold, and both are choices rather than facts about your firm. A per-hour figure needs ten client hours behind it before it is drawn, because $400 over half an hour is not a rate, it is noise — the Overview card says Shown once 10 client hours are logged until then, the monthly chart says Months under 10 client hours are left blank., and the per-client chart counts the clients it left out.

The other is eighty per cent: a job counts as under its price when its fee came in below that share of what its hours were worth. That is what Jobs under 80% realization on the watchlist and Under 80% realization on Work are counting — a round number chosen so a small discount does not read as a problem. Wherever a count depends on either threshold, the hint beside it says so.

What a blank means

A dash is not a zero. It means Vylan could not measure that figure from what has been recorded, and the card names the setting that would fill it. A zero, on the other hand, is a counted zero — every row was read and there were none — and is stated as such.

• Anything about cost or margin — Set rates in team settings. The Cost rate on each person is what fills labor cost, estimated margin and clients in the red; the Billable rate is what fills the Billable lens and the charged-versus-worth comparison.
• Over budget and budget-versus-actual — planned hours on the service in your catalogue, or on the job itself under Budget and hours. A job inherits its service's hours until you set its own.
• On-time delivery and jobs past due — a Due date on the job. A job without one is neither late nor on time, and is counted as undated.
• The month meter — a Monthly billing target, set from the meter itself with Set target.

Reading it honestly

Insights can only see what was written down. A week nobody logged is a week that looks free, and a client whose hours went unrecorded will look more profitable than they are — which is the failure mode worth knowing about, because it makes the worst clients look like the best ones.

Money is collected money. On Revenue by month an invoice raised is Billed and a payment that arrived is Collected; the two are never mixed, and the target line is drawn over billed only. Apart from the unpaid cards, which are what you are still owed, every money figure on the page is collected money — which is why so many of the titles now say so.