Bill rates and billing

Every billable hour is worth an amount, and that amount comes from a rate the app worked out at the moment the hour was logged. Two things follow from that, and between them they explain almost every “why is this number wrong?” question: where the rate comes from, and when it’s decided.

Where the rate comes from

There isn’t one rate. There’s a chain, and the app takes the first one it finds, most specific first:

	Where it’s set
1	This person, on this phase
2	The phase’s default rate
3	This person, on this project
4	The project’s default rate
5	This person, for this company
6	The person’s own default rate

Read it as: “What do we charge for Bo on this phase? Nothing set — what does this phase charge? Nothing — what do we charge for Bo on this project?” and so on down. The first answer wins and the rest are never consulted.

Most organizations use two of these six. A default rate per person, and a project override when a customer negotiated something different. The other four exist for when that isn’t enough — and the reason there are six is that real rate cards are genuinely this fiddly, not because anyone enjoys it.

If an entry has no amount at all

The bottom of the chain is the person’s own default rate, and it can be blank. When it is — and nothing more specific is set either — the entry has no rate, which is not the same as a rate of zero. It’ll show as billable with no amount, and it will block that customer’s invoice rather than quietly invoicing at nothing. Setting the person’s default rate fixes it everywhere at once.

When the rate is decided

At the moment the entry is created. The rate is copied onto the entry and stays there.

This is the part that surprises people, so it’s worth being blunt about the consequence:

Changing a rate does not change hours already logged

Raise someone’s rate today and every hour they logged yesterday is still worth yesterday’s rate. That’s deliberate — an invoice you sent last month shouldn’t silently change value because of an unrelated edit this month — but it does mean “I fixed the rate” and “the numbers are now right” are two different jobs.

When a rate was genuinely wrong rather than genuinely changed, there’s a recalculation tool that re-applies the current rate to already-logged entries. You’ll find it on the project, in Time Tracking → Settings → Projects → edit — it works a project at a time, for a chosen set of people and a chosen date range, rather than rewriting everything everywhere.

It’s deliberately narrow, and it will tell you what it skipped:

• It only touches unbilled entries. Anything already on an invoice is left alone.
• It only touches entries logged in this app. Time imported from elsewhere keeps the rate it was imported with, because that system is the source of truth for it.
• It previews before it applies, showing you the total before, the total after, and the difference.

Use it for a correction. Don’t use it to apply a price rise retroactively.

The billing dashboard

Billing → Overview is the money view of the time everyone has logged.

Four numbers across the top — unbilled hours, unbilled amount, billed hours, billed amount — for whatever date range you’ve picked, then a breakdown you can flip between by customer and by project.

Unbilled is the one you’ll actually look at. It’s the answer to “what have we done that we haven’t charged for yet”, which is the question that matters at the end of a month.

The detail view

Billing → Detail is where you go per customer, and it’s the screen you’d work from when preparing an invoice.

Pick a customer — or jump straight to a project — from the search box. Press / anywhere on the page to get back to it. Then you get:

• The period, with Previous month and This month as one-click presets.
• A billed / unbilled / all filter. It opens on unbilled, because “what still needs invoicing” is the question you came with — so the engineer table below is showing you outstanding work, not everything. Switch to all when a total doesn’t look like you expected.
• Include non-billable entries, off by default. Turn it on when you want to show a customer everything you did, including the parts you didn’t charge for.
• Narrow to projects, for a customer with several.
• A per-engineer breakdown — hours, non-billable hours, amount — and a progress bar showing how much of the period is already billed.

Export CSV gives you the raw entries; Invoice (XLSX) gives you a spreadsheet shaped like an invoice. Both are available for the whole customer or for one engineer at a time.

What “billed” actually means

An entry is billed when it has been included in an invoice raised from this app. Until then it’s unbilled, however long ago it was logged and however certain you are that you charged for it.

Nothing becomes billed on its own

There is no “mark as billed” button, and time never ages into the billed state. The only thing that stamps it is a successful invoice push to your accounting system. If your organization isn’t connected to one, everything stays unbilled forever — the unbilled total keeps growing and the billed total stays at zero.

That’s not a fault, but it does mean the billed/unbilled split is only meaningful if you’re raising invoices from here. If you’re not, treat the dashboard as “work done, by customer” and use the date range as your period marker instead.

Once an entry is billed it’s also protected: the recalculation tool skips it, and it keeps the invoice number it went out on.

Who can see all this

Billing is for admins — either a platform admin, or someone given the admin role on the Time Tracking module. Everyone else sees their own hours and their own entries, but not other people’s amounts and not these screens at all. If a colleague says they can’t find Billing, that’s why, and module access is where it’s granted.