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A rate turns an hour into a number. TimeTracker uses two rates on every hour, and keeping them straight is the key to the whole money side of the product. This page is the short version. Each idea has a full page behind it.

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The two rates

Billable rate

What you charge the client for one hour.

Cost rate

What that hour costs you.
The gap between them is your margin. Example. Sarah Lin works 3 hours on Bluebird Coffee’s homepage. That is the entire model. Everything else is detail about where the rates come from and who is allowed to see them.

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Why two numbers matter

A plain time tracker knows you worked 3 hours. It cannot tell you whether those 3 hours made money. Because TimeTracker carries both rates on every entry, you can see a project’s profitability while it is still running – not after you invoice it and work out the margin in a spreadsheet. See profitability and margin.

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Where rates are set

A rate can be set in more than one place. When more than one applies, the most specific one wins:
There is no workspace-wide default rate. The workspace sets your base currency, not a fallback price. If no level has a rate, the hour is recorded with no monetary value rather than being priced at zero.
Cost rates are simpler: they are set on the person only. The exact order is on how rates are chosen. Read it before you set overrides, because it is the page that explains a number you did not expect.

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Rates are frozen onto each hour

This is the most important rule, and it is the one that protects your history.
When a time entry is saved, it keeps a copy of the rates that applied at that moment.
So if you raise Sarah’s rate from 100to100 to 120 in July:
  • Hours she recorded in June are still worth $100/h
  • Hours she records from July are worth $120/h
  • No invoice you already sent changes
  • No report of last quarter quietly rewrites itself
Without this, a single rate change would silently restate every historical number in the product. See rate snapshots.
This also means fixing a rate does not fix past entries. If someone was set up at the wrong rate for a month, changing the rate corrects the future. The past needs a re-apply, or an adjustment on the invoice.

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Who can see what

Cost is walled off from billing, deliberately. A Project Manager typically sees billing rates and revenue, but not what individual people cost. That is usually what a business wants: the person running delivery does not need to know their colleagues’ pay. Reports enforce the same wall. A report that asks for margin returns no margin to someone without cost visibility, whatever the report definition says. See report permissions.

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Currency

A workspace has a default currency, and rates can be recorded in others. Where a conversion is needed, an exchange rate is applied and recorded with the figure, so reports across currencies add up consistently. See currencies and exchange rates.

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Plan notes

  • Billable rates are free. Setting what you charge is available on every plan.
  • Setting a cost rate needs Pro. That is the single write behind the profitability feature.
  • On Free, cost and margin you already recorded stay readable. You just cannot set a new cost rate, so margin stops being kept current.
See plans and features.

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Rates and non-billable hours

A non-billable hour has no revenue but still has cost. That is exactly why your margin falls when internal work rises. Sarah’s week: 35 billable hours at 100=100 = 3,500 revenue. But all 39 hours cost 45=45 = 1,755. Margin is 1,745,notthe1,745, not the 1,925 you would get by ignoring the four non-billable hours. See billable vs non-billable.

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Common questions

No. Without them you still get revenue and budget burn – you just do not get margin. Add them when you want to know whether the work is profitable, not only whether it is billable.
No, that is the design. Each entry keeps the rate it was recorded at. See rate snapshots.
A client-portal contact never sees cost rates or margin. What they see of billing is limited to what is shared with them. See what clients can see.
Their hours are recorded with no monetary value. The time still counts toward timesheets, hours budgets and reports – it contributes nothing to revenue.
Yes, and that is the normal case. Rates are per person by default; the project or client level only overrides when you want a single agreed rate.

How rates are chosen

The resolution order, in full.

Set a person rate

The most common thing you will do.

Profitability and margin

What the two rates add up to.

Rate permissions

Who sees billing, who sees cost.