When creating a budget, adding a time estimate is crucial for tracking progress and ensuring timely delivery of services.
Fixed vs. Time and Materials Services
Fixed billing type services allow you to manually input the estimated amount, which can be lower or higher than the total hours negotiated with your client.
Conversely, Time and materials services have automatically filled and non-editable quantities that always match the estimate.
Using the Estimate Column
The Estimate column lets you input approximations of hours, days, or pieces (matching the billing units).
This helps set budget totals and monitor progress against these estimates as the project progresses.
Tip: If you can't see the Estimate column in the budget editor, enable it via the menu icon next to your service group.
Impact on Resourcing
These estimates directly impact Resourcing by influencing your resource allocation based on precise service and budget specifications.
Pro Tip: For Time and materials billing type services, estimates are automatically adjusted based on the quantity entered.
However, for Fixed billing type services, you can input a separate estimate of hours, providing flexibility to sell the service at a fixed price while planning to invest fewer or more hours than initially projected.
Visibility of Estimates
By default, only the budget owner and admin can see the estimates in the budgets and when logging time in My time.
However, you can enable estimates to be visible to other teammates as well. To enable this, go to Settings > Time Tracking Estimate.
Estimates will then be visible to teammates with time access, such as Staff (with time access) and Coordinators.
Note: Clients can't see estimates anywhere in the app unless it is included in a sales proposal sent to them as a document.