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 (or the "Actuals" billing type) 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.
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Under the Time and Materials budget type, you can choose from the following billable rates: Person hourly rate, Service hourly rate, and Budget hourly rate.
For more information on each, check out the paragraphs below.

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

If you choose the "Person" 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).

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

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

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

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

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

This creates a new service line item labeled "Budget" in your budget, summarizing the total time logged or the overall budget used.
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Select one of these options to estimate hours or total budget for individual services within the budget.

This selection adds a dedicated field next to each service in the Services editor found below, allowing you to input specific estimates for each service.

"No budget" is an option that starts your newly created budget with zero estimates.

As you log time, the cost, budget usage, and profitability calculations will be dynamically updated.