New Project Budgeting Types

They’re finally here! New budgeting types have been released to everyone, and we know some of you have been eagerly expecting them. Time is money, so we won’t waste any of it, but rather get down to business right away.

Three is the magic number

Before: no budgeting types, you could only choose whether you’ll be tracking time and expenses on a project and if those tracked hours are billable or not.

Now: three budgeting types. Fixed price, Time and expenses, Non-billable.

Fixed price

This has been one of the most requested options, budget-wise. Many of our users have clients and a defined budget that is agreed upon before even starting a project. Deadlines aren’t the only limiting factor. The financial limit can’t be breached either.

So, the Fixed price budget type allows you to do just that. Enter the budget when you start a project, and you’re set. In the end, this amount is the one that will be invoiced, as well.

We know many clients want to check the progress made on a project. Likewise, you might need to know how many minutes, hours, or days have been invested in various tasks. And you can still do that! The tracking of time and expenses is possible, but it won’t affect the above mentioned predefined budget. What will be affected are the costs and the spent amount of the budget.

Time and expenses

The type of budget you’re already used to in ActiveCollab. Mark the tracked time as billable, enter your expenses, and then transform it all into the amount to be invoiced. This means there’s no predefined budget to be displayed in the Project info or invoiced.

Simply track the time directly on tasks when working on them, make sure you marked them as billable (or set all records to be billable by default on a project/task level), and then charge your clients for your work.

Non-billable

No budget, no billable hours. We recommend this type of budgeting for internal projects. You and your team can still track time, but you can’t mark it as billable, or charge it. We find them more useful for internal projects and processes that require time but are just not chargeable.

What happens to my projects?

Here’s a quick breakdown:

All projects (completed from January 1st, 2020 to date, or active) with a budget set will now become Fixed price projects
All projects with the time tracking option turned off transform into Non-billable projects
All other projects (time tracking enabled, budget not set) will convert to Time and expenses projects

Now, if this solution doesn’t fit your plans, don’t panic. You can change the budgeting type of each project you’re working on, individually or in bulk. We created a special menu that you’ll find in the question mark icon, right next to your avatar, and it’s called Project budgeting setup. Here, you’ll see a list of all your projects, and you’ll be able to select the most appropriate budgeting type for each.

When creating a new project, you’ll be offered the same choice. As always, we can’t wait to hear your thoughts!

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