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Project Costs

How wxrks calculates project costs from your logfile and price list, including minimum fees, TM Savings, manual entries, and when costs become read-only.

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.
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💡 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 four categories — a TM match (including new/no-match text and every fuzzy-match tier), a repetition, a non-translatable segment, or a segment Confirmed by Confidence Score (only when Confirm segments by confidence score is on with Include in the cost analysis) — 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.
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Words Confirmed by Confidence Score are billed against the Words Translation Confirmed by Confidence Score price line, which is added to your Price List automatically. If that line is missing from the Price List in use, these words fall back to the full word rate. See Auto-Confirming Segments by Confidence Score.

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:

  1. Ingestion — the project's files are being read.

  2. Logfile — the logfile (word counts and match analysis) is being generated from the ingested content.

  3. Costs — once Ingestion and Logfile finish cleanly, the final cost figures are calculated.

Costs tab Calculation Control card in Automatic mode, showing the Prices list, the linked logfile and the Cost Processing Steps panel with Ingestion, Logfile and Costs all completed

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:

Calculation Control card on the Costs tab with the Recalculate Costs button highlighted
Costs tab of a Draft project with the more-options menu next to Recalculate Costs open, highlighting the Refresh and Sync Status options
  • 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.


Savings and Confidence Score Savings

When a project uses a Price List, the Costs tab shows a green savings line below the Subtotal — the amount you saved compared to paying full price for every word. This figure isn't available on projects using Manual cost entry, since there's no automatic calculation to compare against.
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How that line is labelled depends on where the savings came from:

  • TM Savings — only Translation Memory leverage saved money, thanks to TM matches and repetitions.

  • Confidence Score Savings — only words Confirmed by Confidence Score saved money.

  • Both — the line reads Savings and becomes expandable. Click it to break the figure into TM Savings and Confidence Score Savings.

Both percentages are calculated against the subtotal, so the expanded rows always add up to the combined figure above them. Whenever a savings line shows, a Subtotal with Savings line follows it — the Subtotal minus the savings — and Other Costs are added on top of that to reach the Total. To set up the price and the net-rate factor behind Confidence Score Savings, see Auto-Confirming Segments by Confidence Score.


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.

Other costs section expanded in Manual mode with no line items yet, highlighting the Add items button
Other costs section showing a saved QA spot check line item with amount, value, calculated value and a remove button

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.

Add Cost modal with the Price list item type highlighted, showing the Unit selector and a reason field
Add Cost modal with the New item type highlighted, showing Description, Reason, Cost Type, Cost Unit Type, Rate Type, Amount and Unit cost fields

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, but if you fill it in, it must have at least 6 characters (e.g., PO-2026-001). Shorter values are flagged with a validation message and are not saved.

Cost Results card of a Draft project with the Invoice Info purchase order field highlighted, next to the subtotal, a green TM Savings line, and the total.

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.

Cost Results card of an Approved project highlighting the message Line items are read-only outside Draft status

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.


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