# Insights Insights is PAI's portfolio-level financial view — a table of all your approved projects showing planned vs. actual financial performance side by side. Where Live Margins gives you the real-time picture for a single project, Insights gives you the organizational picture: which jobs are healthy, which are underperforming, and enough context to start asking why. For anyone with oversight of the business — a head of production, a finance lead, an owner — this is the primary management tool. At a glance you can see how each project is tracking against its approved margin, identify outliers that need attention, and use filters to investigate whether under-performance or over-performance is tied to a specific cause. The goal isn't just reporting — it's knowing where to look. Open **Reports** in the main navigation and choose **Insights**. > [!important] > Insights reports **blended** financials — its margins and totals blend in-house labor cost with out-of-pocket spend. Because those numbers expose in-house internal cost, the module requires the **Insights** permission, which can only be turned on for users who also have **View In-House Internal Cost**. Users without them don't have access to Insights. Reporting is also role-gated more broadly — Guests have no access to any report, Insights included. See [Users and Permissions](../01-Organization-Setup/Users-and-Permissions.md#view-in-house-internal-cost). --- ## How to Use It **Monitor overall portfolio health.** Insights shows you the general state of your active book of work — how many projects are reconciled, how many are still working, and where the organization's margin is trending across the period. **Identify over / underperforming projects.** Sort by Margin Variance and the outliers surface immediately — jobs where actual performance has diverged significantly from the plan. These are the projects worth interrogating: is it a client that consistently drives scope changes? Estimates that consistently run light? A project type that's systematically underpriced? Insights gives you the view; the filters help you find the pattern. **Filter by client** to understand financial performance on a specific relationship — whether a client's work is consistently profitable, whether margins are holding across engagements, or whether a particular client generates more variance than others. **Filter by tag** to slice performance by whatever categories your organization uses. Tags are org-defined, so this works however your team structures work — filtering to "internal" vs. "external" projects, isolating a specific production type, or pulling all "post-only" jobs to analyze that segment independently. Pairing Tags with Margin Variance is one of the most direct ways to understand whether a pattern of underperformance is structural. **Analyze profitability by project size.** Filter by External Total range to compare how your organization performs on large projects vs. small ones — for example, projects over $100k vs. under $10k. Combine that with project count for each segment and you can weigh the margin generated per job against the volume required to generate it. Five large jobs producing $300k margin vs. twenty small jobs producing $100k margin tells you something important about where to focus your business development effort, and Insights is where you have that conversation. --- ## What Insights Shows Each row in the Insights table is a project with an approved estimate; projects still in bidding don't appear. The columns cover the full financial arc from estimate to actuals. Some are hidden by default; turn them on from **Columns** in the grid sidebar. **Project Information** - **Project Number** — PAI reference number - **Estimate Number** — reference number for the approved estimate (hidden by default) - **Job Code** — the project's job code if assigned (hidden by default) - **Client** — associated client - **Approved On** — when the estimate was approved - **Created By** — the user who created the project - **Campaign** — which campaign the project belongs to, if any - **Tags** — any tags applied to the project - **Project Type** — the project's type (for example PAI or AICP) **Project State** - **Stage** — the estimate's stage (Approved for every project Insights lists) - **Budget Status** — whether a budget exists and where it stands: **No Budget**, **Working** (budget generated and active), or **Reconciled** (all expenses have moved to Incurred — nothing left to action) - **Budget Created** — whether a budget has been generated for the project (hidden by default) - **Reconciled** — flags projects where all expense lines have reached Incurred status, meaning the job is fully closed out financially (hidden by default) **Approved Estimate** - **External Total** — total revenue as approved - **Internal Total** — total costs as approved - **Approved Margin** — planned profit in dollars (External minus Internal) - **Approved Margin (%)** — planned margin as a percentage of revenue - **Approved Ext** / **Approved Int**, **Final External Total** / **Final Internal Total** — the approved and final totals, available as hidden columns **Current Performance** - **Working Total** — current sum of all project expenses across all statuses - **Working Margin** — current projected profit (External Total minus Working Total) - **Working Margin (%)** — current margin as a percentage > [!note] > Until a project has a budget, there's no spend to report, so Insights uses the plan: **Working Total** is the internal total of the approved estimate plus approved overages, and **Working Margin** is the approved margin. Margin Variance stays at zero until the budget is generated. Check **Budget Status** to tell these rows apart. **Variance** - **Margin Variance** — the difference in dollars between Approved Margin and Working Margin - **Margin Variance (%)** — the same difference expressed as a percentage; the clearest indicator of whether a job is performing as estimated **AR Tracking** - **ArStage** (hidden by default) — a manually set field for tracking accounts receivable status. PAI doesn't manage AR natively, but provides default dropdown options so teams can track AR state directly in the system if needed --- ## Built-in Views Insights ships with views for the questions you'll ask most. Each is a set of filters you can adjust, duplicate or save as your own. | View | Shows | |---|---| | **Approved This Year** | Projects approved this calendar year (opens by default) | | **Reconciled Projects This Year** | Projects approved this year whose budget is **Reconciled** | | **Working Projects This Year** | Projects approved this year whose budget is **Working** | | **Approved, Not Started** | Approved projects with **No Budget** yet | | **Margin Eroded Projects** | Working projects still profitable but below their approved margin (Margin Variance below zero, Working Margin zero or above) | | **Underwater Projects** | Working projects losing money (Working Margin below zero) | | **Default** | Every project in Insights, no filters | The first two show as tabs; the rest are in the view menu next to them. --- ## Using the Table Insights uses the standard PAI table interface: sort by any column, filter by client, date range or financial metrics, and show or hide columns to focus on what matters. See [Working with Tables](../00-Understanding-PAI/Navigating-PAI.md#working-with-tables). A few useful ways to cut the data: - **Filter by Approved On date range** to scope the view to a specific period: a quarter, a fiscal year, or any custom window - **Sort by Margin Variance** to surface the jobs furthest from plan, over and under - **Filter by client** to review financial performance on a specific relationship - **Filter by External Total range** to segment projects by size and compare profitability across segments ### Totals The **Totals** panel in the grid sidebar sums every project matching your current filters: external and internal totals, approved and working margins, margin variance, and counts of **Reconciled** and **Budget Created** projects. The footer row of the table shows the same sums under each money column. Change the filters and both update, so a filtered view doubles as a period or segment report.