# 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 a head of production, 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 underperformance is tied to a specific client, producer, project type, or estimating pattern. The goal isn't just reporting — it's knowing where to look. Access Insights from the main navigation under **Reports**. --- ## 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 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? A producer whose estimates 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 represents an approved project. The columns cover the full financial arc from estimate to actuals: **Project Information** - **Project Number** — PAI reference number - **Estimate Number** — reference number for the approved estimate - **Job Code** — the project's job code if assigned - **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 State** - **Stage** — the current estimate status (Draft, Sent, Approved, etc.) - **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 - **Reconciled** — flags projects where all expense lines have reached Incurred status, meaning the job is fully closed out financially **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 **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 **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** — 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 --- ## 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 — both 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 **Right sidebar** — the properties panel on the right side of the grid shows aggregate sums across all rows matching your current filters, regardless of pagination. Use this for period or segment totals — the numbers here reflect the full filtered dataset. **Bottom row** — the totals at the bottom of the table show sums of only what's currently visible on the page. If your results span multiple pages, the bottom row reflects the current page only. Use the sidebar panel for accurate aggregate totals across the full result set.