Recurrent Project Budgets in Everhour

Not so long ago, Everhour introduced projects budgets.

Budgets are a good way to keep track of your work. We use them when we agreed with a client on a number of work hours and receive a payment based on it, or we would like to set the deadline internally.

As a result, your team can see what part of a project is complete and how much needs to be done. This is handy to evaluate the progress, see all bottlenecks and ask a team where they get stuck most of the time. If blockers are serious, you may want to meet with a client and adjust the budget.

The current update strives at improving this feature, namely adds the option to set recurrent budgets.

The Problem

At first, you had a budget that you couldn’t repeat. It applied to no period and supposed that you close a project after completing and reaching your budget.

This is a very rare case. Many companies work on longstanding projects and prefer splitting the general budget in phases. When you have a time entry history in Everhour, setting a kind of in-middle-of-work budget shows incorrect numbers.

The same happened when you have a client project you work on each month. The client pays you for X hours a month, but our budget fails at showing if you completed those X hours this or last month.

Solution

From today, you can set different types of budgets.

1) A general budget. It applies to the whole project and is not tied to any period. Although, you now can indicate when to start it. Ex: January, 01. We exclude all time entries from your budget progress that you did before this date.

2) Daily, weekly, monthly budgets. It allows you to make recurrent budgets depending on the phases you work in.

We still display project budgets as a number of hours or a sum of money. In the first case, we count all time that team members tracked into project tasks. In the second case, a member should have a billable rate, or a project should be billable and have a flat project rate. When your team member has no billable rate, we won’t count their time in budgets that are a sum of money.

The budget can belong to a client too. It works here the same way as described above.

We also changed the color of budget progress bars. It now shows as orange when you complete 85% and becomes red when you complete 90%.

The update affects our summary emails. We will start specifying what kind of budget, fixed or recurrent, you have there.

Integrations

By the way, these users who have integration with Asana, Trello, Basecamp and Github, can see and set their budget inside their project management tool.

Our Roadmap

Lastly, some thought for future improvements.

One idea is to send an email notification that you reach, let’s say 85% of your budget.

The second thought is to lock the ability to track time when your project or client budget is complete.

Another idea is to set limits on time tracking for specific team members. This may be helpful if you have subcontractors and you don’t wish them to work more than you agreed. Or it can be used as a precaution measure to prevent a team working overtime and over the budget.

Do you have questions or thoughts on further improvements! Don’t hesitate to comment or send us an email at ask@everhour.com with your suggestions.