New to Teamwork.com: Project Time Budget

Optimize how time is spent on your projects and deliver better outcomes for your clients with Project Time Budget.

Project Time Budget gives you real time reporting, full control over the time spent on individual projects and ultimately revolutionizes how time is spent across your business.  This feature allows you to set a budget of time on any given project, and then use the time logged on that project to calculate the remaining budget over time, leading to a better understanding of efficiency, time utilization and how well a project is running overall. With Project Time Budget, you can:

• Easily estimate how much time you need to allow for a project 

• See in real time how the project is tracking against the allocated time

• Avoid having to rely on estimating time on every single task

• Get early warning when running out of client retainer hours

So how can I use it?

Project Time Budget is great for lots of different types of projects and teams, but it’s especially great for agencies and client services. Here are 5 ways Project Time Budget can help: 1. Quotes and proposals  Agencies can use Project Time Budget to estimate in advance whether it will be possible to get the project completed in the given timeframe based on the resources required. This means you’ll be able to give clients much more accurate estimates in terms of timelines, SLAs and ensure your team doesn’t have to spend additional billable hours on any given project.  2. Retainer management When working with clients on monthly (or other period) retainers, it’s useful to be able to tell when the allocated time for a project is close to running out. Knowing this means that you can easily prioritize which client projects to work on, and you don’t run the risk of spending a disproportionate amount of time on one project over another.  With Project Time Budget, you can even set up proactive alerts to notify you when the budgeted time is reaching a certain threshold, e.g “75% used”. This means that as an agency, you can use your time much more efficiently across all of your projects. 3. Project planning and estimating You can quickly calculate a Project Time Budget using the sum of estimated time on existing tasks. This is really helpful for providing you (and your clients) with more accurate forecasting and timeline development. 

4. Real-time reporting With Project Time Budget, project managers can easily see which projects are having a disproportionate amount of time spent on them or are exceeding the allocated time budget, so they can course correct and move resources where needed. 5. Retrospective reporting After you’ve finished a project, it’s easy to report on whether it was completed on time and within the allocated time budget, or if it used up more hours than were estimated. Having this extra layer of understanding also makes it easier for you and your team to bring learnings from completed and successful projects through to new projects. 

Key features to get you started 

Here are some of our favorite aspects of Project Time Budget, and how it works with some of the features you already know and love in Teamwork.com Repeat budgets You can set a budget to be once off or repeatable. For example, if you’re running a sprint project, you can set the project time budget to repeat every week or every two weeks to align with this.  Budget notifications  If the time logged on a project surpasses any number of predefined thresholds (e.g “75% complete”), notifications can be sent so action can be taken quickly. Dashboards A Budget Usage panel has been added to the Dashboard so that users can quickly find projects that are falling within (customizable) ranges (such as “X” or “Y”), so you can quickly spot any issues that need to be addressed.

Billable hours You can make the hours associated with your Project Time Budget billable or non-billable, so they can easily sync with your client invoices if needs be. Automated estimates You can choose to populate the budget amount using the sum of estimated time on existing tasks which is really helpful for accurate project planning. Filters You can easily filter projects by budget usage and quickly get a view of which ones are under and over their allocated time budget.  Budget history This allows you to see a full history of previous budgets and their usage.

Future development

Project Time Budget is available now on our Grow and Scale plans.  The “time” aspect of this feature is just phase one of our vision for what a project budget will look like. We’re also looking at how financial budgets could be supported alongside this feature in the future. As always, if you have any feedback please reach out to us at support@teamwork.com.