This post is brought to you by BQE Core.

Your world—at least during the workday—likely revolves around projects. Keeping them going smoothly and profitably is a critical goal for any architecture firm. That’s why you need to monitor them in multiple ways, including through key performance indicators (KPIs). Monitoring them gives you a straightforward, quantifiable way of ensuring that everything is going according to plan.

The 11 KPIs we’re about to discuss make up a potentially daunting list, but when you track them regularly, you’ll have the information you need to make the right decisions for your firm.

1. Work in Progress: Work in progress represents the billable time and expenses that you’ve done but haven’t invoiced yet. It’s important to track as an asset on your balance sheet and as revenue on your income statement. It doesn’t just show project managers how far along work is, but also acts as a booster if your firm needs a line of credit or loan.

2. Earned Value: This is a breakdown of how much of the project you’ve earned so far, the contract amount, and your work-in-hand. You can calculate it as the amount earned (actual work) divided by the contract amount. With this metric, you’ll have a reliable projection of the future success of your project in terms of both time and budget.

3. Profitability: An essential KPI! Profitability is, of course, your costs versus what’s been billed and the resulting profit. It’s crucial to know your project’s profitability while everything is still underway in order to guarantee a positive outcome. Furthermore, once everything is said and done, it’s the ultimate gauge of what you should and shouldn’t do next time.

4. Utilization: Understanding your utilization is crucial if you’re billing hourly or hourly-not-to-exceed, but it’s very useful information even if you’re working on a fixed fee project. You’ll get a picture of your project’s efficiency in terms of billable versus non-billable hours.

5. Contract Analysis: This gives you additional insight into what’s remaining in your contract. Contract analysis refers to a comparison between the contracted amount, what’s been spent, and what’s remaining. This way, you’ll understand ahead of time whether or not your project will exceed your contract amount.

6. Budget Analysis: Similarly, your budget analysis is the breakdown for your services and expenses in terms of what’s been used and what your limits are. You’ll get a quick picture of whether your project is over-budget or approaching budget.

7. Billability Analysis: Your billability analysis aids you in assessing the billability and productivity of a project. It’s a breakdown of your services and expenses in terms of what’s billable, billed, unbilled, and non-billable. When you compare billable versus billed, you get a picture of what’s been earned and what’s in your pipeline.

8. Write-Up/Down: This is the total write-up or write-down on your billable time entries. Knowing your write-up and/or write-down is helpful because you might want to bill the client more or less than the actual billable amount in order to manage the project’s budget. The overall write-up or write-down, moreover, is an illustration of a project manager’s ability to manage the scope of the project.

9. Billing Breakdown: Understanding your billing breakdown helps you assess your client’s reliability. It’s simply the percentage of dollar value of your bills have been paid—or not. Of course, you’d want to look at your AR aging to know how late the client payments are, but this gives you one view of your outstanding payments.

10. Client Hours: This refers to the total amount of logged billable time. With it, you have a sense of whether or not you’re sticking to your time budget.

11 Retainer Balance: The remaining part of your project’s retainer—if it has one, of course—helps you see whether or not your project is on track. If you’ve used up a significant portion of the retainer and still have a lot to do, you know you need to make some changes. This information is especially useful to the principals, partners, accountants, billing users, and project managers in your firm.

While these metrics are vital, staying on top of all of them can be hard. You can calculate them all on your own or try to save time with software. Yet even some of the most sophisticated project management platforms don’t make it as easy as it should be. But with a solution like BQE Core, things are different. Core’s project performance center delivers all of these 11 metrics—and more—in a real-time, intuitive format.

Regardless of how you get your numbers, though, these KPIs—if checked throughout the life of your project—will help you ensure that things come together on time, on budget, and as profitably as possible.