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 = the billable value of time plus any billable expenses at their billed value) 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.)

Reading the budget chart

The project overview chart has two lines:

• The used line (blue) is your actual burn to date — hours or billable value, depending on the tracking method. It runs all the way to today, so a project nobody has logged time on lately shows a telling flat stretch rather than a chart that just ends.
• The planned pace line (green) is where you’d be if the budget were spent evenly from the project’s start date to its end date. The tooltip’s vs. planned pace is the gap between the two — ahead of pace isn’t over budget, it’s just faster than even spending.

A project with no end date has no pace to measure against, so the green line becomes a flat ceiling at the full budget — the question changes from “are we on pace?” to “have we crossed the line?”

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.