You might have clients (managers, CEOs, financials) to whom you'd like to give permission to view time entries and costs for a particular budget in real-time. This eliminates the need for sending timesheets to clients, as they can always log-in and be up to date with everything.

Before you give access to timesheets to your clients, think about whether you want to use the Time approval feature.

If you turn Time approval on, a person responsible for the project will have to approve every time entry before it becomes visible to clients or any other internal reports.

If you don't turn Time approval on, everything that's been tracked will be visible to your clients immediately.

Read more about it here.

Now that you've decided whether you want to use Time approval or not, you can give access to budgets and timesheets to your clients.

The first two steps are the same as for any other client.

Step 1: Invite your clients to Productive and have them sign up.

Step 2: Add them to a project you're working on.

Now comes the important part.

Step 3: Find a client you want to set up permissions for.

Step 4: Open their profile and select Edit Permissions from the menu.

Step 5: Check the Can access budgets and timesheets box and Update person.

At this point, you only said that this client will be able to access budgets and timesheets, but you still didn't say which budgets exactly. So, checking this box doesn't give your client an insight into anything yet.

Let us show you how this looks from a client's perspective.

When a box is not checked this is what a project looks like to a client:

When a box is checked two additional tabs show up:

But there are still no data in these two tabs. You still have to explicitly define which budgets you want to give access to:

Step 6: Go to the project and switch to the Budgets tab. This is where you'll see all the budgets for these projects.

Step 7: Click on a budget you want to give your client access to and switch the Client Access switch to Enabled via the Budget sidebar:

As mentioned above, if you use time entry approval, clients will be able to see only approved billable time entries.

Now that you've given access to a budget to your client, you're probably wondering what exactly they see.

This is why we added the “View as a client” option to budgets:
​

Turn it on and you’ll see exactly what your clients see on this page, basically, you’re viewing the budget “through their eyes”:

Want to know more about approving, editing, and deleting time entries? The difference between worked hours and billable hours? Check this article.