Are you ready to track your time with Timeneye? Create your project and set your budget
🌟 This feature is included in the STARTER Plan and up
Before you set the project budget, you'll have to know what type of project you're going to track. In Timeneye, it is possible to set up a Time Budget or a Monetary budget for each project. This article will show you how to create a Time budget.
Please note: a project can have either a Time or a Monetary budget, not both at the same time.
Here's a reminder of the project types available in Timeneye:
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Time&Material: A project that is billed by the hour, with billable rates. In this type of project, you typically charge for expenses as well;
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Fixed Fee: a project that has a set price, regardless of the time tracked. In this case, you and your client have agreed on a specific fee and that is what you'll invoice your client. You may or may not want to charge for expenses in this case.
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Non-Billable: a project that doesn't have an hourly rate and isn't billed by the hour to a client, like an internal project. It may still have a budget, for profitability/management purposes.
Time Budgets are available for Time&Material, Fixed-fee, and Non-billable projects.
The option to set the budget is available in the Create new project dialog in the Budget field.
If the Budget section is not visible immediately, you must scroll the dialog window until it appears.
You also have the option to update an existing project and give it a Time budget. You can do it when you edit the project:
Enter the hourly budget for your projects, and then Save.
Recurring budgets
If you work with retainer contracts, you may need to allocate a fixed amount of hours to your clients periodically.
In the Budget recurrence field, you can set the budget to reset weekly or monthly:
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If you select None, the budget will never reset. Instead, it will be just a one-time total budget for the whole project;
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If you select Weekly, the budget will reset on a day of the week of your choice on a weekly basis;
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If you select Monthly, the budget will reset on a date of the month of your choice.
In the Projects section of the account, you can see a bar with the progression of your budget as team members track time.
Tracking your Time Budgets
On the Project status page, you'll be able to monitor the progression of the project. The colorful progression bars will serve as a guide to see how much of the time budget has been used. The bars turn from green to yellow to red as the budget is used and exceeded.
Hourly Budgets for Phases, Users, and Tags
Within a project's total budget, it is possible to set specific budgets for Phases or even Users and Tags.
You can set up these budgets while editing your project.
In the Phase tab, you can set up the hourly budget for each phase. If the budgets you set up for your phases exceed the total you have set for the project, the system will notify you before saving. If you save it anyway, the total budget will be updated accordingly.
Similarly, in the Users tab, you can set up the hourly budget for the team members who are part of the project. If the budgets you set up for your team members exceed the total you have set for the project, the system will notify you before saving. If you save it anyway, the total budget will be updated accordingly.
The same can be done for the Tags. If you want to make sure that the Tags' budget is mandatory, you can also configure this option in the same section:
Please note:
When you add budgets for individual users, tags, and phases, the total time budget will update to match the sum of these individual budgets if it exceeds the original budget set during project creation.