Completing projects and billing agreed budgets

Project completion

Now you can mark a project as completed when you finished it. This solves the problem that the revenue of this project wasn’t considered in all your analyses.

Status quo regarding the handling of hard budgets

For budget projects, clockodo always calculated the budget that was really used compared to the budget that is available. If a project wasn’t planned well enough, the budget utilization could be 200 % after the finalization, for example.

Apart from the project report, revenues aren’t calculated for hard budgets but are marked with a suitcase symbol in the reports builder next to the project times instead. The reason for this is that you don’t know if you will use the exact amount of the planned budget while you are still working on this project:
When you work on a task for 7 hours and use the default hourly rate of 100 €, you don’t know if you will generate exactly 700 € before completing the project. This revenue will only emerge if you used exactly 100 % of your budget. That is why clockodo doesn’t show the revenue of 700 € but the suitcase symbol that implies a hard project budget.

New: Mark projects in clockodo as completed and calculate revenues

Because of this described problem we implemented the project completion. For every project, you can find the button ‘Complete project’ in the project report.

After a project completion, the effective revenue of hard budgets can be calculated for every added time entry. Now that the used budget is fixed, the revenue can be calculated partially: In the example, you worked for 7 hours at a default hourly rate of 100 € and the budget utilization comes to 200 % so that the effective revenue is 350 € because you exceeded the budget.

Exactly these effective revenues will be shown and applied against the planned budget in clockodo after completing a project. This is how you gain a better overview of the total revenue your company generated during a time period. In the exports (CSV, PDF), the effective revenues will be shown as well, just like the relating effective hourly rates for hard budgets where you saw a 0 before.

Optionally, everything stays the same

When you don’t complete a project, everything will stay as it was and you can only see the suitcase symbol instead of the effective hourly rates in the reports builder.

Clocking lock after completion

For a completed project, clockodo saves the key figures of the project revenue so that these are still available even if time entries are deleted afterwards.

That means that if a project is completed, nobody can clock billable times any more. Not billable times are still possible to add.

Billing projects with hard budgets

Besides the completion of projects, we launched another new function: the billing of projects with hard budgets.

Save the exact amount of the budget that is already billed

So far you could only mark single time entries as ‘already billed’ for hard projects. This was not useful as with an agreed budget you invoice your customer exactly this budget or a part of it.

This can be recorded in clockodo now: For every project you can enter the part of the budget that is already billed. That means, for hard budgets you don’t mark single time entries as ‘billed’ anymore but the whole project budget.

Billing budgets

Budgets can’t only be marked as ‘billed’ but they can also be included into the invoices that are created in clockodo.

In the reports builder, you create an invoice by using the button ‘Create bill’ at the bottom of the page. As it’s usual, the window with the billable times opens. You can now find projects with hard budgets that belong to the initial report here as well. These are billable completely or partially.

The billing status for former projects must be set manually

We can’t infer the information about the amounts already billed for your former projects reliably from the existing information. Therefore, you can find a feature on the page with the ‘project reports’ overview to add a billing status for your projects retrospectively.

Changing rights for using hard budgets

The access rights for your co-workers concerning time entries with hard budgets change. They will stay editable even when they are marked as ‘billed’. For further information please read the Preannouncement we published on this behalf.

Filter by budget in the reports builder

Additionally, you can find a filter ‘budget’ at the head of the reports builder page. Here you can filter the projects by budget types for a clear overview.

Technical and functional details & modification of interface

Due to the new billings, the handling of time entries changes in the background.

Project completion and billing via API possible

The project completion and the project billing can be set via our interface (REST-API). The new filter for budget types is also available at the interface.

When is a project marked as billed?

As described, you save the mark ‘billed’ not for single time entries any more but for the whole project.

Internally, the time entries will remain as ‘not billed’ until the whole project is billed. So, if a budget is only billed partially, the time entries remain as not yet billed, especially at the interface and the CSV export functions.

To provide the best compatibility retrospectively, former time entries remain as ‘billed’ even though the budget is not yet billed completely.

Mark groups of time entries as billed via API

It’s not possible any more to mark a group of time entries as ‘billed’ via the interface when it contains times for hard budgets. Then the belonging project must be marked as billed (via api ressource /api/projects) and the group of time entries that should be marked as billed has to be filtered by times without hard budgets.