Set client and project rates

A rate card says what a person costs you and what they bill by default. Most firms also price some engagements differently: a discounted pilot, a client with a negotiated day rate, a senior consultant billed higher on one account. Client and project rates hold those exceptions. They change what an hour bills; what it costs stays on the rate card and never appears here.

Where to set them

Open People, then Rate cards. Below the org-wide cards you will find Project and client rates. Choose Project rate or Client rate, pick the project or the client, say who it applies to, and enter either an hourly rate with its currency or a markup on cost. Dates work the same way as on rate cards: an open-ended rate runs until you end it, and two rates for the same target and person cannot overlap.

Until you have recorded a client, the section is called Project rates and offers project rates alone, because there is nothing to price a client rate against. Add a client on the Clients page and the client half appears.

Note

The section appears only on Onplana Services workspaces, and only to people who can manage rate cards. A project manager who cannot see rate cards cannot set a project rate either. That is deliberate: a rate is a commercial term, and the same people who own the rate cards own it.

Which rate wins

For each approved hour, Onplana takes the first of these that exists:

1. A project rate for that person
2. A project rate for that person’s role
3. The project rate for everyone
4. A client rate for that person
5. A client rate for that person’s role
6. The client rate for everyone
7. The person’s rate card (their own card, then their role’s, then the org default)

So a client rate applies to every project for that client until a project says otherwise, and a rate for one person on one project beats everything else. With no client or project rates at all, nothing changes: every hour bills exactly as it did before.

Won deals carry their rates

When a deal is won and its project is created, the client’s active rates are copied onto the new project as project rates. The rate the deal was priced at is the rate the project bills, from the first approved timesheet, without anyone re-entering it.

Billing in another currency

A client rate can be in a currency other than the cost rate’s. The margin report then converts the hour’s cost into the billing currency using the exchange rate captured when the timesheet was logged, so a later rate change never rewrites a past month. The report’s Rate basis line says how many hours were converted. If a pair cannot be converted at all, the hour appears in two currency rows rather than being netted at a made-up rate, and the line says so.

Where it shows

• The margin report prices each hour at the rate for that person on that project, and counts how many hours a project or client rate priced.
• Revenue at risk and the compliance exceptions view are org-wide figures with no project in scope, so they use each person’s default rate.
• A project’s Finance tab uses the project’s rates for its revenue figures.