Projects

A project is a piece of work with a budget. Tracked time burns against the budget, so you always know where you stand — before it’s too late to do something about it.

The three project types

Fixed fee — you charge one agreed price (say $5,000/month for an SEO retainer). The fee is your revenue; the question the project answers is “are we delivering this within the hours it’s worth?”

Time & materials — you bill for the hours worked. Revenue is calculated as hours × billable rates. The project tracks burn against a target you set.

Non-billable — internal work: your own marketing, admin, R&D. No revenue, but you still want to see the hours and what they cost you.

Which type should I pick?

Decide by asking one question: how does the customer pay?

• The invoice amount is fixed per billing period — the client pays $X per month or quarter regardless of the exact hours worked → Fixed fee. This is true even when the engagement is scoped as a bucket of hours: if the billing is fixed, the hours are your delivery target, not your revenue driver.
• The invoice is computed from the work — hours actually spent × billable rates, plus any billable expenses → Time & materials. Here the hours dictate the revenue, so set the target (billable $ or hours) to what you’re expected to deliver per period.

How the work is scoped (a price, a bucket of hours, “whatever it takes”) doesn’t decide the type — the payment mechanics do. For the full walkthrough, including hour-bucket retainers on both sides of this line, see Modeling retainers.

Taking over a contract mid-way? Enter only what remains from the point your tracking starts (e.g. 90 hours left of an original 140), so the burn math matches reality — hours used before your data begins can’t be pulled in.

Tracking method: dollars or hours

Each project tracks its burn either financially (budget in $, burn = cost or billable value of time) or hourly (budget in hours, burn = hours tracked). Pick whichever matches how you scope work.

Which rate applies

For billable projects you choose how the money is calculated:

• Project rate — one flat hourly rate for everyone on this project
• User rate — each person’s own billable rate
• Role rate — the rate of each person’s role (see Rates)

Recurring projects (retainers)

A project can repeat monthly, yearly, or on a custom cycle. Each cycle gets its own period with a fresh budget, and past periods keep their history — so you can see whether the retainer was profitable this month and over its lifetime. (Available on Starter and above; the number of recurring projects depends on your plan.)

Budget alerts

On Pro and above, project alerts email the right people when a budget is at risk or blown — so an overrun is a conversation mid-month, not a surprise at invoice time.

Where does the time come from?

A project is linked to work in ClickUp the same way clients are. Time tracked on the linked work burns the budget automatically after each sync.