Plan a project so the timesheets run themselves

Personas: Project manager (sets up the project, the tasks and the team) · Modules: Projects, Timesheets Set up a billable engagement once — project, tasks, team and each person's billing rate — flip it to ACTIVE, and from then on every month's timesheet is created for you automatically, pre-filled and ready for the team to confirm.

Before you start: the Customer must exist, and each team member must exist as an Employee. The Company defaults to your base company.

1. Create the project — Project manager

1. In the Projects sidebar group, open Projects and click + New top-right.
2. Enter a unique code and a name, pick the Customer (required), and optionally the start and end dates. Company defaults to your base company; Billable defaults to on; Status defaults to PLANNED.
3. Save. The project appears in the list as PLANNED.

2. Add the tasks — Project manager

1. Open the project — its page has two drill-in lists: tasks and team.
2. In the tasks list click Add and enter each task's name and optional estimated hours. The estimates feed the Estimate by Project bar chart.

3. Staff the team, with rates — Project manager

1. In the team (assignments) list click Add, pick the Employee, optionally note their role, and enter their billing rate (required).
2. The rate is per employee per project — different people bill differently on the same engagement. It is manager-facing only: employees never see it; it silently prices every day they book (hours × rate).

4. Go live — Project manager

1. Set the project's Status dropdown to ACTIVE and save. There is no approval flow — ACTIVE is exactly what switches the monthly timesheet generation on for this project.

5. The month arrives on its own — the system

1. At 02:00 on the 1st of each month, for every project whose status is ACTIVE, the system creates that month's Project Timesheet in the Timesheets module: project and customer pre-filled, period = the new month, status OPEN.
2. Under it, one employee timesheet line per team assignment (status DRAFT), and under each line one 8-hour billable allocation per working day of the month.
3. The moment each line exists, its owner gets a Submit task in their own Inbox — the unchanged month is one click for them (see Fill in your timesheet).

What happened behind the scenes

• Project statuses come pre-seeded: PLANNED (default) → ACTIVE → CLOSED — a plain dropdown you set yourself.
• The monthly generation saves everything the normal way, so each day's rate snapshot, its amount (hours × rate) and the hour/amount roll-ups to the line and the project-month all compute immediately.
• Each new employee line starts its own submit → approve flow; the "Project Timesheet" TS-number is stamped only after the manager approves it.

Variations and refusals

• Project not ACTIVE (PLANNED or CLOSED): no timesheet is generated for it. Closing a project is how you stop the monthly timesheets.
• No team assigned yet: the month's Project Timesheet is created with no employee lines — staff the team before the 1st to get the pre-filled month.
• Duplicate code: the project code is unique — a second project with the same code is refused.

See also

• Projects module · Timesheets module · Fill in your timesheet · Approve and invoice a project timesheet