What Onplana Services is

Onplana Services is Onplana for firms that sell their people’s time: consultancies, agencies, studios, engineering shops. It is the same delivery product underneath, with two things added at the ends.

Onplana already handled the middle of that story well. Projects, dependencies and critical path. Who is free next month. Timesheets, approvals and rate cards. What it did not have was the client-facing front (who might buy, and what they asked for) or the money view (whether the work you delivered actually made anything).

Services adds exactly those:

• Clients: the companies you work for and the people you talk to there.
• Pipeline: deals from first conversation to won, and a won deal becomes a delivery project in one step.
• Margin: what the firm made on approved time and expense, per currency.

Note

Services is a separate product, not a bigger Onplana plan. An Onplana customer does not get Clients, Pipeline or Margin at any tier, and a Services customer does not get the enterprise-IT tiers above them. They are two products for two audiences that happen to share a delivery engine.

Clients and contacts

A client is a company you deliver for. It carries the things you actually need at hand: industry, location, the currency you bill them in, and which of your people owns the account.

A contact is a person at that company. One of them can be marked primary, which is the person the rest of the app reaches for when it needs “who do we talk to here”.

Caution

A contact is a record, not a user. They have no login, they see nothing, and they never count toward your seats. That is deliberate: your seat count is your own staff, and it would be a strange bill that grew every time you added somebody else’s phone number.

Occasional people are guests, not seats

A contractor who works two days a month, an accountant who only needs to see expenses, a client’s own staff member logging hours on a joint project: invite them as a guest. A guest logs time and expenses on the projects they are invited to, and their submitted weeks reach your approvers like anyone else’s. They are not held to weekly hours, they never appear as “not started” in the approvals view, and every paid plan includes a free guest allowance, so they cost nothing until you go past it. Your seat count stays your own staff.

What a client page tells you

Open a client and you get the commercial relationship in one screen:

• What they have asked for: ideas, issues and change requests raised on their behalf, grouped by where each ask ended up: still undecided, became delivery work, or went through change control. The middle bucket is where unbilled scope quietly lives.
• Margin: what this client has cost and earned so far this year, per currency, with the projects it came from.
• Deals: everything still in play for them, and what is already won.
• Contacts and the account details.
• Discussion: a comment thread on the client itself, the same one you use on a task or an issue. This is where the account conversation lives when it is about the relationship rather than any one project.
• Files: contracts, statements of work, signed quotes, kept on the client instead of scattered across the projects that came out of it. Drag them in, or paste a screenshot straight into the panel, up to 100 MB each.

Who can read, and who can add

Everything on a client page is readable by anyone in your organization except guests, so a delivery lead can look an account up without being a member of its projects. That is an organization-level rule on purpose: a client relationship is not scoped to one piece of work.

Two things are narrower than reading:

• Editing the client and uploading files to it need the client permission, Portfolio Manager and above by default. Attaching a contract to an account is treated as the same kind of act as editing the account.
• Commenting is open to everyone who can read, so somebody can raise a concern on the account without being able to change it.

Guests sit outside all of it. A guest is scoped to particular projects by definition and has no standing on the relationship behind them; an API token restricted to specific projects is treated the same way.

Agents can join the conversation

A connected agent reads and posts in a client thread on the same terms as a person. That is worth knowing if you use one to prepare for a client conversation: it can read what has already been said about the account rather than only what is on the tasks, and leave what it found where the next person will look. See Connect an external agent.

How to get Onplana Services

Services is not something you unlock from an existing Onplana plan, so you will not find Clients, Pipeline or Margin waiting behind an upgrade on the Billing tab. It is onboarding by request right now: join the waitlist at onplana.com/services and the team will reach out to set your organization up.

Where to start

Any non-Guest member can open Clients and Pipeline and see what is there. Margin is narrower: it exposes cost and billable rates, so it needs the budget-read permission, which sits with Owners and Portfolio Managers by default. Adding a client, contact, or deal needs Portfolio Manager or above.

Steps

1. Open Clients and add the companies you already work for. A name is enough to begin with; currency and account owner are worth setting because both flow into deals and projects later.
2. Add a primary contact for each.
3. Open Pipeline and put your live opportunities in, at whatever stage they are really at. See Run your pipeline.
4. Once work is delivered and time is approved, Margin starts answering whether it was worth doing. See See your margin.

Tip

Margin needs approved time and a billable rate to say anything useful. If every figure reads zero, that is usually a setup gap rather than a business result, and the report tells you which by showing how each hour was priced.