The Costs tab on a project shows what it costs to translate, broken down by language pair, and lets you adjust or add to that figure by hand when needed.
💡 Who is this for? This guide is for Account Admins and Project Managers who need to read, troubleshoot, and manually adjust a project's calculated costs within the wxrks platform.
How costs are calculated automatically
When a project has a Price List, wxrks calculates its cost from the project's logfile: every segment is counted under one of three categories — a TM match (including new/no-match text and every fuzzy-match tier), a repetition, or a non-translatable segment — and priced using the rate your Price List defines for that category and language pair. Each category becomes its own line, and all of a language pair's lines across every workflow step in the project (Translation, Review, DTP, and so on) are grouped together into that language pair's total.
If your Price List defines a minimum fee, wxrks applies it automatically wherever the calculated total would otherwise fall short — either against the whole project's subtotal, or against each language pair individually, depending on how the Price List's minimum fee is scoped.
Cost Processing Steps
Before a cost figure is ready, wxrks works through three stages, shown as a live status panel on the Costs tab:
Ingestion — the project's files are being read.
Logfile — the logfile (word counts and match analysis) is being generated from the ingested content.
Costs — once Ingestion and Logfile finish cleanly, the final cost figures are calculated.
A step can finish with a warning (shown as a Warning status, meaning some content had a non-fatal issue) or fail outright (shown as Failed) — either way, check the flagged step first if a cost figure looks wrong or missing.
Refresh, Sync Status, and Recalculate Costs
Next to the Recalculate Costs button, two smaller controls help you troubleshoot a stuck or outdated figure:
Refresh — just re-fetches the current data into view. Use this first if a number looks stale after someone else made a change.
Sync Status — reconciles the Ingestion/Logfile status shown against what actually happened on the backend, without recalculating anything. Useful when a processing step looks stuck.
Recalculate Costs — fully re-runs the calculation from the current logfile and Price List. This replaces every existing cost line, including any manual entries you added — it doesn't merge with them. Only recalculate once you're ready to discard manual adjustments.
TM Savings
When a project uses a Price List, the Costs tab shows a TM Savings figure next to the Subtotal — the amount you saved compared to paying full price for every word, thanks to Translation Memory matches and repetitions. This figure isn't available on projects using Manual cost entry, since there's no automatic calculation to compare against.
Manual Cost Entries
If a project needs costs that the automatic calculation can't produce — no Price List configured, or figures that need a human judgment call — switch the project to Manual mode. In Manual mode, you enter figures directly into the Cost Breakdown per Language and Other Costs sections instead of relying on the logfile.
Adding Cost Items
Whether you're in Manual mode or just adding an extra line on top of an automatic calculation, Add items gives you two ways to add a cost:
Price List Item — pick a coefficient already defined on your Price List (a Rush Fee or a Project Management Fee are common examples), so the amount stays consistent with what's been commercially agreed for that client or project.
New Item — define a fully custom line: your own description, reason, and amount, for a one-off cost your Price List doesn't cover.
Which specific coefficients appear under Price List Item depends entirely on how your account's Price List is set up — always double-check the totals before finalizing a project's costs.
Invoice Info
If your workflow requires a purchase order number on the invoice, enter it in the Invoice Info field on the Costs tab — it's optional and has no required format.
Costs become read-only once a project leaves Draft
Every cost mutation — recalculating, adding, editing, or removing a line item — is only allowed while the project is still in Draft status. Once it moves to Approved or beyond, every cost control becomes read-only, including Recalculate Costs itself.
If you need to adjust costs on a project that's already moved past Draft, you'll need to revert it to Draft first (via the project's status controls) before any cost control becomes editable again.