The Time and Materials budget type in Productive's Simple Budget Editor offers detailed control over billable rates and budget estimates.

This article will guide you through customizing billable rates for your team and services, setting budget estimates, and efficiently tracking project progress within this budget type.

Opting for Time and Materials enables you to estimate project time and scope accurately, tying service invoicing directly to logged work (hours or days) in Productive.

📌 Tracking time against these services is crucial for billing accurately for delivered services.

Billable Rates

Under the Time and Materials budget type, you can choose from the following billable rates:

Person hourly rate
Service hourly rate
Budget hourly rate

For more information on each, check out the paragraphs below.

Person Hourly Rate

This option allows the hourly rate to be specific to the person working on the service in the budget.

If you choose this option, the hourly rate will apply to the person you have selected for that service, with a set tracking restriction (meaning only the selected person will be able to log hours for the said service).

Service Hourly Rate

This option allows the hourly rate to be specific to the service itself in the budget.

When you choose this option, the hourly rate will apply to the service you have selected in the budget, regardless of the person working on it.

📌 Select Show Custom Service Name to manually enter the service name, and Show Description to quickly describe the service for better organization.

Budget Hourly Rate

This option allows the same hourly rate to be applied to all services within the selected budget.

When you choose this option, the set hourly rate will apply to all services within the budget, regardless of the specific person or service.

Estimated Budget and Tracking Progress

The Estimated Budget picker allows you to enter an estimate of total hours or total price for the entire budget.

You can also set estimates for the number of hours per service and the budget for each service.

This helps you stay within your budget without going overboard or falling short. We'll go over the mentioned options below.

Total Hours per Budget and Total Price per Budget

Use one of these two options to estimate either the total number of hours or the total price for the entire budget.

Total Hours per Budget is useful when you know how many hours you’ll sell in total but aren’t sure how they’ll be distributed across services. For example, set 100:00 hours as the total, then add services and apply rates using the Service rate (billable rate picker) option.
Total Price per Budget is helpful when you know the overall price of the work—say $10,000—but don’t yet know how that amount will be split among services.

📌 In both cases, this setup adds a new service line item called "Budget", which displays the total estimated and logged hours or the total budget used.

When time is tracked against individual services (note: the Budget line item itself can't be selected when logging time), the tracked hours or amount are deducted from the overall budget.

For Total Hours per Budget, you'll see the number of hours logged compared to the total—e.g. 10/100 hrs logged.

For Total Price per Budget, you'll see how much of the total value has been used—e.g. $9,000 remaining out of a $10,000 budget for 10 hours logged.

Hours/Days per Service and Budget per Service

These two options let you estimate time or value per service, rather than for the entire budget.

Hours/Days per Service: Use this when you want to define how many hours (or days) are allocated to each service individually.
For example, if you set your person-day to 6 hours, entering “2 days” for a service will calculate as 12 hours. This is useful when your pricing or planning is based on day units rather than raw hours.
Budget per Service: Use this when you prefer to define a fixed monetary value per service instead of estimating hours.
In this case, the system calculates the quantity based on your estimate and rate:
Quantity = Estimated budget ÷ Rate
For example, if the estimated budget is $2,000 and the rate is $100/hour, the quantity becomes 20 hours.

📌 These options give you more granular control over your budget by allowing you to plan and track at the service level, either by time (hours/days) or by total price.

No Budget Option

No Budget starts your budget with zero estimates, meaning no hours are pre-filled.

As you log time, costs, budget usage, and profitability will update automatically based on what's tracked.

📌 Even though it's called No Budget, the Estimate field still appears in the editor, and you can add estimates manually if needed. This option simply means you're not starting with predefined values.

Disabling Booking and Time Tracking for Services

You can enable or disable time tracking and bookings for each service in your budget. To toggle these options, click the clock icon when editing the service.