Projects

The Projects home is where you manage your projects, from estimating a quote to sending the final invoice. Read on for guidance on adding expenses, allocating revenue, analyzing employee hours and more.

If you start with a quote in the Budget box, Roughly Right will use the overall hourly rate you provided in Basics for the agency and calculate the number of hours the project can use at that rate. The pie chart will represent the entire budget, and the employee costs segment of the chart will be calculated using the hourly employee cost rate from Basics

When you head to the Estimated activities box and start plugging in hours, the Profitability box will adjust and calculate the effective hourly rate for the project based on the activities’ hourly rates.

Once you have made the budget estimate and started planning hours, the Estimate at completion box will appear next to budget so you can monitor the current status of the project. The profitability dashboard takes into account the reported hours and the planned hours remaining to show hours worked on the project and effective hourly rate so far.

You can also simulate different outcomes for the rest of the project. The sliders at the bottom of the Estimate at completion dashboard allow you to create hypothetical scenarios for the project outcome, such as going over budget in hours or expenses.

Activities will still be imported automatically from Basics or the client, and can then be changed without affecting any other project. You can also remove rows that are not applicable to the project.  

You can also inactivate activities that have been used in the past, if you want to stop timerporting on those activities. 

You can start planning time by activity directly from the Estimated activities section using the Employee column. Clicking on the dropdown opens a list of employees. You can select one or multiple employees. Once an employee has been assigned an activity for the project, a planning row is created automatically for them to begin adding hours smoothly.

For an ongoing project which already has some employee planning, you can go straight to planning and add an activity to the planning rows. This will automatically link the employee to the column in estimated activities back in the project home.

New projects come with the activity list configured of their client, or the activity list from Basics if there are no client activities. Once the project is created, however, its activities are independent from the client or Basics activity lists. 

This means that any activities added to Basics or the client are not added to the project. Any new activity would need to be added to the project as well. 

You can see how the hours break down per activity on the “activity” section of Right now. You can hover over the bars to see the values expressed both as money or hours.  

If there are going to be any expenses for the project you can add them under “estimated expenses”.

If you already have given the project a total budget under “quote”, then Roughly Right will assume the costs for the expenses should be deducted from that amount. If you plan to invoice the client for expenses on top of that budget, we suggest that you add the price for the expense as an addition in the budget.

You can also add a surcharge/markup percentage. You can either enter a percentage markup, or enter a final price manually. The price column is what will be used if and when you add the expense to an invoice to the customer.

Expenses can have a different cost and/or price than was budgeted. Just enter the amount in the boxes for the final cost of the expense and the final price to be charged to the customer. If you do not enter a final cost or price, Roughly Right uses the values from the earlier estimation.

If you do not have an outcome cost the profitability numbers assumes that the estimated cost was correct. 

When an expense has been booked on the project it will be synced into the Project page. You can choose to link one or several transactions in Fortnox to every expense in your budget.

When the expense is linked we update the outcome amount and allocate the expense in the month in which it is recorded.

If you have not entered the expense under “Estimate”, you can create a new expense line at this point.

You now have the ability to set a price with surcharge on your expenses. The outcome price you set here can be imported automatically onto the client’s invoice. If an expense should not be re-invoiced to the client you can toggle off “invoice client”.

Allocation allows you to allocate the income from the projects during the months which “deserve” it, based on the workload. Expenses can also be allocated here. By default, Roughly Right guesses that the expenses are to be allocated the same months as the income, in the same proportion. You can override this however simply by entering your preferred value.

The employee time tab is a list of employee hours that you can sort and filter to generate useful reports which can then be exported to Excel. You can adjust the date range, group time reports by an attribute, see which hours have been invoiced to the client, and also link directly to an employee’s time report to make a change.

There is now the Control tab to make it easier to check the project's liquidity now and in the future. You can check up on invoicing vs income and expenses here.

If you need to add or change details about the project once it's created, you can edit the project using the pencil icon at the top, or by simply clicking on the information to change.

You'll also find a notes section to keep track of anything elabout the project. Keep in mind that the notes are shared across the organization, so any notes you make can be seen and changed by other users.

When all the work is done and everything invoiced, the last step in a project is to head to the control section and press the Finish project button.

Tags are an optional feature for organizing your projects. Click on the pencil icon in the top, Create tag, and then New row where you give your tag a name and color. A tag appears as a colored dot next to the projects in the main projects overview, and text can be read by hovering over the dot.

The tags can be used to filter several views in Roughly Right. It can be useful as a way to measure the profitability of different types of projects e.g. retainers vs fixed price, etc.

Internal time is normally logged without a project. Internal activities are created in Basics as an activity with “Project Related” unchecked. “Normal Hours” is unchecked for absence activities e.g. sickness and vacation.

If you want to plan internal projects, you can create your organization as a client and start creating projects off of it. In the project settings, there is a toggle for internal projects. It might be helpful to have a separate list of activities for internal activities on this client.

When a project is marked as internal it will not be contributing to an employee or organization occupancy. For example, if an employee has worked 20 hours on client projects and 20 hours on internal projects their occupancy level will be 50%.