In Productive, services are the building blocks of both budgets and deals. When you're setting up a sales deal, adding services allows you to define the scope of work, estimate pricing, and prepare for tracking time and expenses.

If the deal is won, these services can then form the foundation of your budget and invoicing setup. Services in deals help you:

You can’t invoice a deal until it’s marked as Won. Any time or expenses tracked on an open deal generate cost only, not revenue. When winning a deal, you'll have the option to move time entries, expenses, and bookings from the deal to the budget.

After creating the deal, select "+ Add services" to start adding services to your deal.
You can manually add the service or copy a predefined service set from a rate card.

Once you add a service from a rate card, you are welcome to further modify it without affecting the information in the rate card.

Each service line item you add to the deal includes a service name—this is what you’re billing for (e.g., Design, Development, or Consulting).

You can also organize services into sections with custom labels by clicking "Add Section" at the bottom. These section names help structure your deal and make it easier to read.

Service sections appear in several places in Productive:

Sections are optional, but they help both your team understand how services are grouped.

Service types categorize services for financial reporting. Set them up in Settings > Service Types. Once added to deals or budgets, they act as internal classifications (e.g., Strategy, Engineering, QA).

📌 You can create new service types on the fly if "Quick Add" is enabled in Settings.

After defining the service types used to track profitability, the next step is to configure the billing type for each service in your deal.

In the Billing type column, choose between:

Click the column to select the option that best fits your arrangement.

These options determine how time and expenses are tracked, how people are booked, and how you invoice the client once the deal is won and the work is completed:

📌 Note: You cannot invoice a deal until it's marked as Won. Until then, any time or expenses tracked against the deal will be treated as cost only.
This is important to consider when choosing billing types and enabling tracking on deal services.

When you win a deal, you’ll be prompted to move:

👉 Learn how to enable or disable time and expense tracking for deal services based on pipeline stages.

Choose the tracking unit: Hour, Day, or Piece.

Tracking options depend on billing type and unit. You can toggle:

These icons must be violet to be active.
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📌 Example: Time and Materials + Hour = time tracking and booking enabled. If you choose Piece, only expense tracking is available.
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The Estimate column lets you input an approximation of hours, days, or pieces (matching the billing units), helping set budget totals and monitor progress against these estimates as the project progresses.
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It's crucial to note that the estimated hours/days directly impact Resourcing, influencing your resource allocation based on precise service and budget specifications.

When working with Fixed or Time and Materials billing types, you can specify the quantity (hours, person-days, or pieces) you intend to sell to the client, along with the corresponding price per hour/day/piece established for the service.

Non-billable services, not intended for client invoicing, do not affect the budget total. Therefore, inputting quantity and price values is not applicable for such services.

Tracking time or logging expenses against non-billable services incurs costs, which are reflected in the Profitability section of the budget.

If you want to add a discount to your services, you can add it by clicking on the Show discount option in the three-dot menu located to the right of the service section name.

Once you click on it, a new Discount column will be visible and you will be able to set up a different discount for every billable service.

The total amount changes accordingly once the discount is added to the service.

If you want to add a markup to your services, you can add it by clicking on the Show markup option in the three-dot menu located to the right of the service section name.

Once you click on it, a new Markup column will be visible and you will be able to set up a different markup for every billable service.

The total amount changes accordingly once the markup is added to the service.

For services that are defined as Time and Materials, you can define a fixed cap which will then determine the maximum price that can be charged to the client, regardless of the hours put in.

To set it up, first, select Time and Materials as the billing type and define the price and the quantity. From the three-dot menu to the right of the service section name, select "Show fixed cap".

Then, click on the padlock (🔒) icon to set a fixed cap. You'll know the fixed cap has been activated when the padlock turns violet.

📌 Example: You set a €10,000 cap. Even if €12,000 worth of time is logged, only €10,000 is billed.

To add a description to your services, select the Show description option in the three-dot menu located to the right of the service section name.

The description you add there will later be visible in the reports!
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To speed up your setup, you can duplicate both individual services and entire service sections.

Once you are done adjusting the services within the deal, select "Save changes" in the upper-right corner.

When a service needs to be reallocated—whether to adjust invoicing, refine a budget, or group work under a different deal—you don’t have to recreate it from scratch.

Instead, you can move it between deals and budgets while keeping all related time entries, expenses, and bookings intact.

This ensures financial accuracy and saves time. Learn more about how to move services between deals and budgets here.