Projects & Costings

Projects & Costings answers a question attendance alone cannot: not how many hours were worked, but what they were worked on. Recording time against a job rather than only against a day is what makes budgeting, capacity planning and milestone tracking possible instead of estimated.

It is also what makes client billing defensible. The breakdown you put in front of a client is the same data your team clocked, with the same timestamps, rather than a reconstruction assembled at the end of the month.

The Costings Report is the summary view: hours and cost by project, by stage, by person. Run it while a job is live rather than only at the end, because a project drifting over budget is recoverable in week two and not in week nine.

Transactions is the detail underneath the report: every billable line, attributed to a person, a job and a work code. When a client queries an invoice, this is the answer.

Ledgers hold the running position of a project: what has been spent, what has been billed, and what is still to come.

Set a budget for a job and watch it consumed in real time as hours are logged against it. The alert that matters is the one that arrives at seventy per cent, not the one at a hundred and ten.

WorkCodes are how an hour gets attached to a project. Keep the list short enough that people choose the right one without thinking. A long work code list produces data that is technically complete and practically useless.

Tasks are job cards assigned to team members, carrying the detail they need: what is being done, where, and what materials it takes. The person on site gets the brief and the business gets the record.

Stages and Types structure a project so progress means something. Without them a job is either open or closed; with them you can say what is finished and what is not.

The client record holds the rates that apply, the breakdown of billed hours and the invoices issued. Because the breakdown comes from logged time rather than a summary, a client question can be answered to the hour.

Contractors records subcontracted labour against the same jobs as your own staff, so the cost of a project is the whole cost rather than the part you employ directly.

Rates can differ by role, by client, by shift or by job, and the right one is applied automatically when time is logged. Setting them here rather than adjusting invoices later is what keeps billing consistent across a team.