Rate Cards

Rate cards let you set consistent billing rates by role, tailor them per client, and keep your historical billing accurate even as rates change over time.

How rates are organised

Organisation roles: your base set of billing roles and their hourly rates (for example, “Senior Designer” or “Account Manager”).
User defaults: each person can have a default role and an internal cost rate, used to separate what you bill from what the work costs you.
Client rate cards: optional overlays that adjust the base rates for a particular client.

How a project’s rate is decided

When work is billed on a project, the effective rate for each role is resolved in this order:

The client rate card selected on the project, if one is set.
The client’s default rate card, if it has one.
Your organisation’s base roles.

A client card acts as an overlay: it mirrors all of your active base roles by default and only stores the rates you choose to override. This means:

Existing organisations keep working without setting up any client cards.
Projects use your base organisation roles until a client card is selected.
If a project doesn’t name a card, the client default is used when available; otherwise the base roles apply.

Rate snapshots

To keep historical billing accurate, rates are snapshotted at the moment they’re applied:

A project member’s billable rate is captured when they’re assigned.
Time entries capture both the billable rate and the internal cost rate that applied.

Rate cards during project creation

Brief-driven planning resolves a client rate card before creating the draft. The proposed project members and tasks capture rate snapshots for planned-cost review.

Your organisation or client planning policy can require a person to confirm the card before activation. When this applies, the project action says Confirm rate card. Open the Team tab, choose the intended project rate card, and then activate the project. Selecting a card refreshes matching task and member rate snapshots for the draft.

Archived cards are not used for new effective rates and are removed from any project that was pinned to them.

Reporting

Insights uses the rates captured on each time entry. Its financial figures are:

Realized Revenue: billable time multiplied by the captured billable rate.
Internal Cost: all logged time multiplied by the captured internal cost rate.
Gross Profit: realised revenue minus internal cost.
Profit Margin: gross profit as a percentage of realised revenue.
Budget Variance: the project budget minus realised revenue.

A budget is a limit or forecast, not earned revenue. The Insights Overview shows rate coverage for the selected period and warns when older time entries need a legacy rate fallback. See Insights & Analytics to review the results by project, client, team member, or month.

Currencies and multi-region teams

Rates can be in different currencies. Each base role and client card override carries its own ISO currency code, and each person’s internal cost rate keeps its own currency too, so a studio with staff in London, Sydney, and New York can price everyone in their local currency.

To keep reporting consistent, every organisation has one reporting currency. All financial roll-ups (Insights, campaign budgets, cost totals) convert into it using the conversion rates you manage in Settings → Rates → Currencies & FX:

Add a rate for each currency pair you use (for example GBP to AUD), with the date it applies from.
New time entries are valued using the rate that applied on the day the work happened, and that valuation is frozen. Updating a rate later never changes past reporting.
If a currency pair has no rate yet, those amounts are included unconverted and the Insights Overview shows how many entries are waiting on a rate.

Cost rate changes work the same way: setting a new internal cost rate for a team member applies from today onwards, and each organisation you belong to keeps its own cost rate for you.