Overview
Managing profitability across a large, international organisation is rarely simple. When project revenues, employee hours, and cost structures live in separate systems — HR exports, Excel sheets, account records — getting a clear picture of which projects are actually making money, and which are quietly draining resources, becomes a manual nightmare.
We built a bespoke desktop application in C# and WPF that brings all of this together in one place. The result: project managers, account leads, and financial controllers can instantly see the health of every project and account, without touching a spreadsheet.
The Challenge
Our client, a large international organisation operating across multiple divisions, had a familiar problem. Employee hours were tracked against WBS codes (Work Breakdown Structure) and exported from their HR system into Excel files. Revenues were managed separately — spread across recurring contracts, yearly indexed rates, and itemised billing per customer. Nobody had a single tool that could cross-reference hours against revenues and tell you, cleanly, whether a project was profitable.
Finance teams were spending days each month manually reconciling data from multiple sources. Outliers were missed. Decisions were delayed. The organisation needed clarity, fast.
What We Built
We developed a standalone desktop application using C# and WPF, designed to run securely within the company's internal environment without any cloud dependency.
Hour registration and WBS import The application reads Excel exports directly from the HR system, parsing employee hours per WBS code. It handles the messy reality of real-world HR exports — inconsistent formatting, merged cells, varying column structures — and normalises everything into a clean internal data model.
Revenue entry and contract management Project and account managers can enter their revenues directly in the tool, structured as recurring revenue streams, yearly indexed rates, and per-item breakdowns per customer. The structure mirrors how the business actually operates, making adoption immediate.
Cross-divisional analysis With hours and revenues in one model, the application generates cross-divisional breakdowns automatically. Profit and loss per month, per project, per account, per employee — all calculated in real time. Finance controllers can drill into any project and see exactly which employees contributed, at what cost, against what revenue.
P&L visualisation The tool renders profit and loss data in clear, interactive charts. Outliers — projects running significantly above or below expected margins — are immediately visible. No pivot tables, no manual chart building. The application surfaces what matters.
Technologies Used
- C# / .NET — core application logic and data processing
- WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) — rich desktop UI with responsive layouts and interactive charts
- SQLite — local data storage, no external database dependency
- MVVM architecture — clean separation of logic and presentation for maintainability
The Outcome
What previously took a finance team several days of manual work per month now takes minutes. Project managers have continuous visibility into their P&L without waiting for end-of-month reports. Account leads can see the profitability of their specific customer relationships in real time. And outliers — the projects quietly losing money — are caught early, not at year-end.
The application is in active use across multiple divisions of the organisation, handling hundreds of WBS codes, dozens of active projects, and thousands of employee hour records per reporting cycle.
Interested in Something Similar?
If your organisation is managing project profitability across spreadsheets and separate systems, we can build you a tool that brings it all together. Whether it's a desktop application, a web-based dashboard, or an integration with your existing ERP — we start by understanding your process, then build exactly what you need.