Projects, rates and forecast

Set up clients and projects, give people rates, and see who is planned this week.

Projects

Projects groups work under clients. Expand a client to see its projects, with hour budgets, fee budgets, rates and retainers. Search matches client and project names and opens the groups that match. Projects with no client sit under Internal.

• Editors create and edit clients, projects and categories. Members use them when tracking.
• A project can store a budget in hours, an hourly rate, a retainer and whether new time on it is billable. Archive a project when the work is finished. Restore it if it comes back.
• Assigning members to a project is an admin action.
• Categories are workspace labels for entries: a name and a colour. They are not a second project list.

Rates

An invoice line uses the project hourly rate when the project has one, otherwise the member’s rate, otherwise zero. Set member rates in Settings → Team for a personal workspace. On an organisation workspace the roster is read-only inside TurtleTime and rates are managed with the organisation. A client-specific override, when set, sits between the project rate and the member default. Blank means “use the default”.

Forecast

Forecast is the week plan, separate from time already tracked. Move between weeks, search people, clients or projects, and switch between People and Clients & projects. The header shows team hours against capacity. People with manage access can turn on a weekly AI forecast. A budget row warns when less remains than the week needs.

Retainers

A project retainer is the fee pool for that work. TurtleTime warns as billable spend approaches it: around 80 percent, then when it is used up. Those alerts show on the tracker and in reports. They use the rates above, so a project with no rate and members with no rate will not estimate revenue.