Projects & budgets
Know where the budget went
A project hangs off the client and carries a budget in hours and money. schakl shows in colour how hard that budget is burning, and opens the exact hours that spent it right under the bar.
On the client, with a budget
A project is a client engagement: it hangs off the client page (the hub), alongside contacts, domains and appointments. It carries an hour budget (the capacity), a money budget and an hourly rate, all optional, because these are planning figures and not ledger entries. Tasks and logged time belong to the project, so logged-versus-budget stays true on its own.
Retainers that reset every month
Choose whether the hour budget covers the whole project or refills every month, week or day. That is how you model a retainer: a monthly hour cap that reads zero again on the first. The period boundary is a real Amsterdam calendar day the API decides, not the browser: an hour logged in the evening lands in the right month, even around the daylight-saving switch.
- Whole project: one budget for the engagement
- Monthly: the retainer that refills each month
- Weekly or daily: tighter caps for ongoing work
One colour scale for burn
Burn has exactly one scale: green below 75%, amber below 100%, red from 100%. The percentage is never clamped, so a project over budget reads red and reports a negative remainder; only the drawn bar stops at full. A project with no budget shows an em-dash and still reports what it spent: never a fabricated total, never a reassuring zero. Every logged hour counts, billable or not, because internal work on a client project consumes the budget just the same.
Every number opens
12.5 / 40 h invites exactly one question: which hours? Under the budget bar the Hours panel opens with precisely the entries that added up to the number, over the same period as the bar, with the same ⋯ to edit or delete. From there you step through to the full hours report, pre-filtered, but that report is never the only way in: the person who wants to know where the budget went often isn't a manager.
Planned value, billable value, margin
From the hourly rate and the hours, schakl derives three figures. Planned value is the hour budget times the rate; billable value is what the billable hours are worth so far at that same rate. Alongside them sits cost: logged time times the employee's rate (their personal rate, otherwise the org default). Margin is billable value minus cost, and turns red the moment it goes negative. Hours by people with no rate are reported separately, never quietly priced at zero.
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