Getting your projects across the finish line on time and on budget – it can be a bit of a minefield.
That’s why, over the last few months, we’ve been rolling out some new features to help you understand how profitable your projects really are. And that continues with today’s product update.
Set internal cost rates for project work
Hot on the heels of managing billable and non-billable project time together, we’ve released another new profitability control inside Timely: cost rates.
Cost rates let you capture the hourly labor costs of people on your projects.
Together with their cousin “billable rates” – the fee you charge to your clients – they provide a more holistic view of project performance.
They’re ideal if you work with external contractors and staff up for specific projects, but equally great if you simply want to better understand the profitability of different project rates.
Provided you’re an admin, click "Edit user" for anyone on your workspace and you’ll find that you can now assign them an individual cost rate, in addition to a billable rate.
You have the option to apply cost rate retrospectively to hours people have already logged – whether billed or unbilled – for a historic view of cost vs. profit. Alternatively, you can simply choose to apply these to new time entries.
Once added, you can then export that cost data across your projects from the Reports page.
With these profitability control features, the aim of the game is to help you determine your resourcing needs and catch any issues early from right within Timely – giving you complete control of your projects’ health and ensuring you hit every one of your deliverables on time and on budget.
Cost rates are currently available for Premium, Unlimited and Enterprise users.
Little big updates
It’s safe to say we’ve been in spring-cleaning mode around these parts. This month, our incredible team of developers came up with pretty nifty feature fixes and improvements to add some spring to your step (see what we did there?)
- Customize your reports in a snap. Hey admins, want to refine your reporting even further? You can now reorder, show and hide columns any way you like when exporting your reports. (We’ve also made the formatting and structure consistent across XLSX and CSV files, so your reports might look a little different than they used to.)
- Showing some love to our Android users. You guys can now log time against specific tasks within your projects. (You’ll need to have the Tasks add on running on your workspace to use this optional feature.)
- Squashing bugs. We fixed a sneaky little error that caused Timely to crash while setting a duration for logged time entries.
Improving the way that you and your team work is our number one priority. Whether it’s creating new features, enhancing existing ones, or optimizing the Timely app so that you can work as efficiently as possible, there’s no update that’s truly small in our eyes.
And with that, we bid a farewell to April.
