Project Time, Expenses & Billing

A project carries a budget split by category, tracks what has actually been spent against it, and can override your business's billing rules for its own work. This article covers where those numbers come from and where to change them.

How money reaches a project

A project does not record time or costs of its own. Money reaches a project through the jobs linked to it. Crews clock on to jobs, materials go on jobs, and jobs become invoices — the project totals those up so you can see budget against actual in one place.

That means the day-to-day work is unchanged: see Time Tracking on Jobs, Materials & Expenses and Converting Jobs to Invoices. Linking each of those jobs to the project is what makes the project's figures real.

Setting the budget

The budget is split into five categories. Set them when you create the project, or change them later:

1. Open the project's Overview.
2. In the Budget & Costs card, select Modify.
3. In Modify Budget & Financials, set the budget for Labour, Materials, Equipment, Subcontractor and Other. The Total row adds them up.
4. Set the Health Status and the Progress (%).
5. Select Save Changes.

The dialog shows Budget, Actual (to date) and Variance side by side per category, so you can see which line is running hot before you adjust anything.

Reading Budget & Costs

Back on the Overview, the Budget & Costs card gives you:

• A Budget tile and a Spent tile
• A utilisation bar with the percentage used and the amount remaining
• A Variance row — budget less actual
• A Breakdown table of the five categories plus a total, each with its budget and its actual

The Projects list carries the same idea at business level, with Total Budget and Total Actual counters across every project.

Billing rules for one project

Standard hourly rates use the customer’s enabled rate first, then the project rate, then the business rate, and finally the employee’s enabled rate. A project rate applies when the customer has no enabled standard rate. Other billing rules use project settings first, then customer settings, then business settings.

1. Open the project and select the Settings tab.
2. Select Billing Rules.
3. Switch on the rule you want to change — Standard hourly rate, Time rounding, Minimum billable time, Overtime or Across-the-board rate adjustment — and set its values.
4. Leave the field. Each change saves as you go; press Escape to undo one before you leave it.

A rule you leave switched off follows the project's customer where that customer has its own rule, and the business-wide setting otherwise. Each switched-off rule says which one it is using. See Managing Customers for a customer's own rules.

Invoicing at milestones

To raise a progress claim each time a project passes a milestone, use the Project Milestone Reached — Invoice Phase workflow rather than doing it by hand. Install it from the template library and adjust the wording. See Templates & Suites.