Financial Tab

Your Financial Tab will be available on any given project, and is functionally here to help you determine the cash inflows and outflows of a given project. We break this down into three different columns: Project Costs, Your Clients Budget/Estimate, and the Bill Total/Revenue.

Costs can be tracked in one of two ways. You can either use the Staff Cost rates, which will pull the staff pay rate used in your Settings/Hourly Rates/Cost and Charge Rates Defaults, or the Hourly Cost rate, which will use the cost listed in the Hourly Rates half of the same page. The core difference is whether you consider the role required for the job to be the best method for cost tracking, or the individual themselves.

You can also turn this off in the scenario where you arent interested in cost tracking for this project.

Budget functionally describes what you intend to charge your client as an estimate, which functionally only applies in the scenario where you intend to bill your client on the basis of time tracked. In that sense, you can keep track of what you intended to bill your client at time of project outset, and then compare that with how much time you've actually spent. This can be helpful in seeing where deviations from the plan might have lead to greater/lesser profits.

You also have the option to turn this off, if you intend to bill on the basis of a fixed project total or similar.

This section determines how you intend to charge your client. In doing so, we provide a few options. The first is that your project can be a set Fixed Fee. This takes a lot of the fuss out of billing, and will mean you're not using any variables like unit quantities, hours allocated or time spent.

There is also the related Billable Phases/Milestone Billing option, which is functionally similar to fixed fee but broken up into a per phase split. This means you can charge $4000.00 for Phase One, but $6000.00 for Phase Two, as an example.

The next option is Time and Materials. This will go through all items and check what rates are assigned to each item, and then calculate your revenue based on the time you've tracked. In this scenario as stated above, it may make sense to use the Budget field to keep track of your expected total. This means the figure will grow as your project progresses and as more time is tracked.

The last option is Set Rates (Fixed or Allocated), which is going to use the time allocated figure, as well as assigned rates, to bill your client. In this scenario, the figure will be fixed from the start, and will functionally mimic the data in your quote.

It should also be noted that if you turn any of these settings off, or want to change several at once, this can be achieved via the Financial Settings button as seen below: