Presented below are the most frequent terms in Productive and their explanations.

Admin is the highest permission set after the owner. Admins can manage everything, including cost rates and general organization-level settings.

AGI (adjusted gross income) is the gross invoicing (per client, project, time period) minus the client-related expenses. Please check the reports library for several useful AGI reports.

An allocation in Productive refers to the number of free days granted per the various time-off categories.

API is a set of definitions and protocols for building and integrating application software. Access data is available via the settings, and documentation is available separately.

Approvals are flows used to approve three sorts of entries: billable time, expenses and time off. Using the approval system, entries only become official after they are approved by the responsible person.

An assignee is the person in charge of carrying out the activities specified on a task. Assignees are specified separately on tasks, subtasks and to-dos.

Automatic time tracking is an option that allows time to be logged against scheduled services without their assignees having to manually track it.

The amount of time a person is available to work on projects. Calculated as Capacity (cost rate) minus time booked on time off (vacation, sick leave...).

New Productive features that are not yet available to all Productive users are Beta features. Contact the Productive team to sign up for the beta program!

Billable rate is the rate billed to the client for an hour of work on a certain budget or service.

Billable time is the amount of time spent on a task or budget that will get invoiced to the client. Different to worked time, as worked time may contain time that will not be invoiced to the client. May include both Time and materials and Fixed service types.

Billing type is the pricing model set up on each service on a budget or deal. There are two primary billing types: Time and materials (or hourly pricing) and Fixed.

The accumulated average rate of the recognized time, according to billable hours and calculated based on recognized revenue. Expressed as Recognised revenue / Recognized time.

A board is a type of layout available in Tasks, Deals and Budgets, allowing you to organize your tasks in columns and drag-and-drop them around as needed.

A budget is the "container" for all of a project's financial data. A budget contains services, amounts, expenses and more, and each project can have multiple budgets assigned to it.

Budgeted time is the number of hours anticipated within a specific budget to work on all of the services on that budget.

Capacity is the time a person is available to work on projects, defined primarily by their cost rate.

This permission set is made for a person who can communicate with your team on tasks, and also depending on permissions, access time entries, and other info about deals. They may also be referred to as a guest.

A contact is your client (connected to a client company) or a contact you saved.

A permission set usually assigned to a person who sometimes works with your team but is not part of your company, such as a freelancer.

The cost rate is the basic price of work for your employees, or in other words, their salary. The cost rate plus the overhead per hour equals an employee's cost per hour.

Custom fields are additional data fields that allow you to customize the data on your bookings, budgets, companies, contacts, deals, expenses, invoices, projects, and tasks.

By using the data import options in Productive, you can quickly import data from other tools (e.g. Harvest, Asana, Trello...).

Data source refers to the source of information when creating a report, e.g. Projects, Deals, Financial items, etc. Creating a report from multiple data sources is currently not supported in Productive.

A deposit or prepayment is any amount of money received from a client before the related services are provided.

A deal signifies a prospective project for you and a potential source of income. Deals may be turned into projects with their respective budgets.

A discount (or markdown) is a deduction from the cost of your service, expressed as a percentage.

Docs allow you to maintain and keep extensive documentation on your projects and other points of interest, akin to Google Docs or Confluence.

A draft is an entry that exists in Productive but has not been finalized and as such has not been made official. Drafts are used for task comments and invoices.

In Productive, the "Employees" group refers to your company's employees and any contractors you add, both of whom count as paid seats. You can find the list of your employees under Resourcing > Employees or Settings > Users.

Estimate at completion is the projection of the total time needed to complete a Task. It is the sum of "Time to complete" and "Worked time".

The estimated time required to complete the work in the budget scope. The sum of all estimated times of all line items on the budget.

Expenses are all external costs arising due to work on a budget. May be submitted by and tracked against an employee, or against a third party (vendor).

Fallback represents a secondary option in case the primary option is not available. Used in revenue recognition, it allows for the revenue recognition to revert to another date if the primary date is not available.

Feed is the log of all updates and changes on a specific item in Productive, such as a budget, project or task.

A field is data related to a certain item in Productive. Fields are shown in the Productive interface and can easiest be manipulated in the Table view. E.g. a Project Manager is a field on a Project.

Filters are a tool used to limit your search or display to only the required entries, e.g. showing only tasks where you are the assignee.

Fixed billing type services are billing types defined on services in budgets. Services defined as fixed may be charged without time having been tracked against them. Used when prices are agreed as a fixed sum, not based on the actual amount of work invested. See also: Time and materials (services).

Forecasted refers to the sum of current data and future data.

Gantt is a type of bar view for visualizing task and project phases.

The General Data Protection Regulation or the GDPR is a European Union legal instrument ensuring the protection of individuals concerning the processing of personal data and the free movement of such data.

ID is the unique and unalterable identifier of any item in Productive.

The initial estimate is the initially forecasted amount of time needed to complete a task.

Reports are highly customizable objects available in Productive for a variety of uses.

An integration is a procedure that ensures communication between Productive and another tool. These tools include Slack, Google Calendar, Office 365 calendar, Quickbooks, Xero, Exact, Visma e-conomic, Fortnox, Zapier, Jira, and Personio, with other integrations (Pipedrive, Github, Dropbox...) in the pipeline.

Invoiced amounts are amounts for which an invoice has been created and finalized. (See: Draft).

Productive is currently only supported in English. Translation to other languages (German, French, Chinese, Japanese...) is in our pipeline. Be sure to let our team know which language would be interesting to you!

Layout is the configuration of data as presented in Productive. Available layouts are calendar, table, list, board, and timeline.

A library is a premade collection of customizable elements, such as reports or custom fields.

A line item is an individual financial entry on a budget or invoice.

A manager manages projects, budgets, and deals and has access to all deals and their relevant financial information except for costs and profit.

The margin is the difference between the revenue and cost on a budget, expressed as Profit divided by revenue.

Milestones are used to represent an important moment in a project, an extra important task, the end of a project phase, and the like. This feature is currently in development in Productive. Contact us for more info!

Open hours is the placeholder line item automatically added to each budget, along with open expenses.

The revenue generated by all of a project's open budgets is dependent on their pricing model.

The organization is your company in Productive. Details about the organization are defined in the settings. Your organization ID is the unique number of your organization. It can be found either in the web address as the number directly after "app.productive.io". Alternatively, it can be found in Settings, API access.

In the Resource planner, an overbooking is any surplus booking beyond the defined capacity for a person.

Overhead represents all aff your facility costs, costs for internal projects and other upkeep costs. Overhead is added on top of your employees' cost rates (salaries) when calculating the cost of their work.

Overtime is the time worked beyond an employee's listed capacity.

The account owner has admin permissions but also access to billing, past invoices, and the ability to update billing details or deactivate the account. They can set up and send 2FA recovery codes if needed. Ownership can be transferred to another user.

A task that has one or more subtasks is called a parent task.

The "Payment due date" and "Payment date" in the expense input screen indicate when the expense was incurred (i.e. when you paid for it or by when it needs to be paid).

Permissions allow users to view, have access to, or change individual elements of Productive, as governed by their permission sets.

A permission set is a group of access privileges (permissions) for each user in Productive. The system permission sets include Staff, Coordinator, Manager, Profitability Manager, Admin, Client and Contractor.
You can customize permission sets in the Permission Builder and assign them to users as well.

The piece is a billing type on financial line items (alongside Fixed and Time and materials), used for expenses.

Placeholders are 'users without access to Productive' used to plan and schedule work for people who are not yet a part of your organization.

The PO number is a unique number assigned to a deal. It will be later automatically transferred to the budget created from this deal.

Probability is the internal estimate for winning a deal. The probability and value of a deal affect its forecasted revenue.

Profit is the revenue generated by a budget or project reduced by the associated costs.

Profitability is the degree to which a budget yields profit, expressed as a percentage of revenue against the associated costs.

The profitability manager is the permission set that allows managing projects and deals, while also providing insight into their profitability.

A variation on the profitability manager permission set, removing access to private deals and projects they are assigned to.

A project represents a job or undertaking carried out for a client or for your internal needs. A project contains one or more budgets (with relevant financial information) and tasks for collaboration towards the realization of the project.

A pulse is a periodical and customizable email notification with data from Productive's Reports.

A rate is a fixed price paid for something. Rates are used for your employee's salaries (cost rates) and for prices that you charge to your clients (rate cards, or on services).

A rate card is a predefined list of Service prices either for a client company or for your organization. Rate cards can then be used when creating new budgets.

Recognized profit is the expected profit of a financial item (e.g. budget). It is calculated as the recognized revenue minus all of the associated costs.

Recognized revenue is the expected revenue of a financial item (e.g. budget) according to the scheduled time, delivered billable time, and generated expenses.

The billable time that is or will be charged to the client. Equal to billable time with Time and materials, but cannot exceed the Quantity with Fixed services.

Also, in budget spending calculations, used as a way to calculate budget consumption.

A recurring budget is automatically copied at a certain time, thus creating a new, identical budget. Most frequently used with retainers.

The place where certain deleted items are stored for a period. Items in the recycle bin can be restored to their original location.

If you need to be reimbursed for an expense (e.g., paid from your personal account), mark it as requiring reimbursement. Later, mark it as reimbursed.

Reports help you analyze and make better sense of your data.

Restricted access indicates a variation on an existing permission set, preventing access to projects, budgets, and deals that the person is not assigned to.

A retainer is an ongoing or recurring contract by which a client pays for certain services as required during a time period. In Productive, retainer projects are handled using recurring projects.

Revenue is the amount of money generated by a specific project, budget or time entry. Note that this does not necessarily mean that this amount has also been invoiced. See: Invoiced.

The Resource Planner allows you to make high-level time allocations for your entire team. It focuses on resource allocation and booking people on services, adding a financial aspect to your planning.

Each active employee and contractor registered in Productive takes up one seat, which affects billing. Note that clients are an exception, and they do not take up seats.

The service offered or provided by you to your clients. Each service is defined by its service type, billing type, unit, quantity and price.

Service types are broad categories of services provided by you to your clients. They are set up in Settings - Service types.

Staff is an employee with a basic set of permissions, allowing time tracking, collaboration on tasks and requesting time off.

A variation of the Staff permission set, adding access to time entries and the Resource planner.

A variation of the Staff permission set, allowing access to contacts.

A stage (or deal status) is assigned to each deal and is used to monitor and organize deals.

Stage types represent the various states jobs may be in. We categorize them into two types.
​Deals: These indicate prospective work and correspond to the sales pipeline.

Budgets: These indicate active work and correspond to the production pipeline.

Statuses are used primarily to organize and monitor tasks within predefined workflows. Also used with invoices (Draft, Unsent, Sent, Paid), budgets (Open vs Delivered), among others.

Subscribers are notified whenever a change is made to an item in Productive. Items in Productive are tasks, invoices, budgets, projects, or the like.

A subsidiary is a unique branch of your company, allowing you to invoice your clients from different addresses.

Along with to-dos, subtasks are a method of subdividing tasks in Productive into smaller chunks.

Tags are custom attributes in Productive that you can apply to a plethora of items: tasks, people, invoices, and largely replaced by Custom fields.

A task is an item in Productive that allows coworkers to collaborate on their various assignments.

Task dependency indicates an interdependency between two tasks and their status. Dependencies come in two basic types: blocking/waiting and linked. Blocking/waiting indicates that one task cannot be started or completed until another task is completed. Linked simply indicates that the two tasks are somehow related.

Task lists allow for a neat way to organize tasks into groups, following your preferred structure. You can group tasks by milestones, departments, phases, or any other categorization that fits your workflow.

A template is a sample item (e.g. project, task or deal) used as a shortcut when creating new items with proper data.

A document template is the layout of data on the documents commonly sent to your clients in PDF format. Used for budgets, invoices, and deals.

An allocation is the amount of time provided as part of a booking (time-off or budget). Commonly expressed in days or hours.

Time and materials is a billing type defined on services in budgets. These services represent time and expenses, invoiced based on their actual use. If no time or expenses are tracked, nothing will be charged to the client. See also: fixed (services).

Time entry locking is an action that prevents creating or changing time entries in an earlier period. May be automatic or manual.

Time to close is the number of days elapsed from opening a deal to winning the deal.

Time to complete is the projection of time needed to complete a task. Reduced as time is tracked against the task, or can be adjusted manually.

Time tracking refers to registering the time invested working on an individual service or task in Productive.

Time off refers to periods when users are not required to track time against services within budgets or tasks. Admins can set up various time-off categories and assign them to users, creating time-off allocations for the team (e.g., summer vacation, sick leave, PTO).

A to-do is the smallest and simplest version of a task, created either from a task or a subtask.

Utilization signifies the ratio between the amount of time a person has worked, and their availability or another type of work. An example is the premade Report Billable Utilization.

Used in tasks, variance at completion signifies the difference between the Initial estimate and the Estimate at completion. It shows how accurate the Initial estimation was.

In the context of expenses, a vendor is the third-party organization to whom the payment is made (e.g., for a client lunch, the lunch is the expense, and the restaurant is the vendor).

A view is used to organize your data and display it in the way you find the most appropriate. A view is made of a layout, filters, grouping and other.

Worked time is the amount of time spent working on a certain time entry, service, budget or project, or the amount of time a person has tracked in a given period. Worked time includes time spent on both client and internal projects.

A workflow is the configuration of task statuses, with each workflow divided into three stages: Not started, Started and Closed.

Located in Project management > Tasks (not individual projects), the Workload layout displays task distribution among team members across all projects. It aggregates workload information with capacity indicators, helping you track your team's daily tasks and overall project workload.
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Note: While the Resource planner focuses on allocating resources and booking people on services, adding a financial component, the Workload layout is centered on task allocation for more granular project planning.