Labor Cost Tracker

What is a labor cost tracker?

A labor cost tracker calculates how much your team's time costs in real money. It takes hours logged per task and multiplies them by each person's hourly rate to produce a cost figure — per task, per project, per client, and per period.

Most agencies track hours and rates in separate places. Toggl records the hours. A spreadsheet stores the rates. A third tool or someone's Friday afternoon produces the cost summary. The number is always a week late, always requires manual work, and is always at risk of human error when rates change.

A live labor cost tracker eliminates every one of those handoffs.

How labor cost tracking works in Melororium

Set each team member's hourly rate once in Employee settings. Every time a team member logs hours against a task, Melororium calculates the cost automatically: hours × rate = cost. The result accumulates per project and per person in real time.

The Work Reports matrix shows cost per project × per person for any date range. The Budget Guardian tab inside each project shows total labor cost spent versus the project budget, with a burn chart and percentage complete. When cost reaches the configured threshold (default 80%), an alert fires.

The KPI widget in Work Reports shows the blended hourly rate — the average cost per hour across all logged time in the period, across all team members. This is the realized rate: what you actually paid per hour versus what you quoted.

Labor cost vs. project budget

Set a budget on each project. The Budget Guardian module tracks the gap between budget and actual labor cost in real time. Burn rate shows how fast cost is accumulating, and a projected end-of-month estimate warns you before you run over — not after.

Pricing

Labor cost tracking from time logs and hourly rates is included in all paid plans. Budget Guardian (project-level cost vs budget view) is included in Agency ($59/mo, 10 users) and Studio ($119/mo, 25 users) plans.