How Effort and Pricing Work

Professional services pricing in ScopeStack is built from three variables: effort (hours), rate (what you bill per hour), and cost (what the resource costs you per hour). Everything else is derived from those three.

The core formula

Each service on a project has a resource (the role performing the work), a quantity, and unit hours. The platform calculates:

A service’s total hours includes both its own extended hours and the extended hours of all its subservices. The same rollup applies to revenue and cost.

The hourly rate and hourly cost come from the project’s rate table, based on the resource assigned to the service. Each resource in a rate table has a rate (what you bill) and a cost (what you pay). See Rate Tables for setup details.

Effort can sit on the service, its subservices, or both. See Understanding Services for the three effort allocation patterns and when to use each.

How pricing changes when you edit

The service editor auto-saves. When you change a field, pricing recalculates immediately:

• Change quantity — extended hours recalculate, which changes revenue and cost
• Change unit hours — same effect as quantity
• Change resource — the rate table maps the new resource to different rate/cost values, which changes revenue and cost without changing hours
• Change rate table (on the project) — all services recalculate with the new table’s rates

Managed services pricing

Managed services use a different model. Instead of hours x rate, each managed service has a service price and service cost per billing period (monthly, quarterly, or yearly). The platform multiplies these by the project’s recurring term count to calculate total contract value (TCV).

Variable rates

Both professional and managed services support variable rates — price breaks where the per-unit amount changes at different quantity thresholds. See Variable Rates for details on setting up tiered pricing.