Overhead Costs

Overhead is everything you pay for that nobody bills to a client. It's the rent on your office, the Figma and Jira licenses, the WiFi, the accountant's monthly retainer, the office manager's salary. None of it shows up on a project invoice, but all of it eats into your margins.

Common Overhead Categories

• Facilities — rent, utilities, insurance, cleaning (€2,000-€8,000/mo for a mid-size studio)
• Software & tools — design tools, project management, cloud hosting, communication platforms (easily €150-€300/person/month)
• Admin staff — office managers, HR, finance people who don't bill hours
• Professional services — accountant, lawyer, payroll provider
• Miscellaneous — team lunches, equipment depreciation, training budgets

A 20-person agency can easily rack up €15,000-€25,000 in monthly overhead without anyone noticing — because it's spread across dozens of small line items.

The Profitability Illusion

Here's where it gets dangerous. Say a project bills €20,000 and the team cost is €14,000. Looks like a €6,000 profit, right? Not if your share of monthly overhead allocated to that project is €7,500. You actually lost €1,500. Agencies that track profit margin without factoring overhead consistently overestimate how much money they're making.

WrkSched handles this through company fixed costs — effective-date records that track your overhead over time. When your rent goes up in March, you set the new amount with a start date and the old period is preserved. The profitability forecast and break-even analysis use these real numbers, so your project budgets reflect actual costs, not just billable hours against salaries.