About Billing Rates

Billing rates are used to calculate billable revenue and internal costs at both the task and workspace levels.

Your administrator defines rates and rate categories according to the standard practices of your company or organization, and determines if external rates will be available at a workspace level.

There are two types of billing rates:

Internal—Internal rates are used to calculate the internal costs of a task or workspace.
External—External rates are used to calculate billable revenue. External rates can be enabled at a workspace type level, so any workspace of a particular type includes external rates. By default external rates are disabled, so external rates are not available.

Billing rates can be assigned at different levels and are inherited if not defined for a particular level. For more information about billing rate inheritance, see Billing Rate Inheritance Overview.

Update Value and Update Date

Billing rates are defined by your administrator. The administrator can also define a future value and date for each rate, specifying an "update value" for the rate and an "update date" on which that future value becomes valid.

Note: Any actual labor costs are not changed when billing rates are changed because actual costs are for work that has already been completed (actual work).

When the update date occurs, the update value is automatically moved into the current value. While you do not see this change occur, it can impact calculations you do see in the following ways:

Estimated Labor Cost/Revenue—The update value of a billing rate takes effect on the first applicable date of the week following the update date when calculating estimate labor cost and estimated labor revenue for resource requirements.
Exported Timesheet Data—

External rates—Work entries store the rate for the user (or task, if applicable) that is current at the time the work is entered. If the timesheet includes work on a task schedule for a future date, the external rate used is the rate that would be in effect at the time the task was originally scheduled.
Internal rates—
Work entries will use the current rate for the timesheet user (or the task rate, if one applies), even if the timesheet data is for past work.
Work entries for work in the future use the rate that was scheduled to be in effect at the time for which the work entries were created, even if that rate has been updated since the work was entered. This means that if an update value changes more than once between the date that a work entry is created and the date of the work, the work entry uses the original update value that was valid at the time the work entry was created.

Derived workspace and task fields—

Estimated Labor—The fields below take into account any upcoming Billing Rate changes, and will calculate cost and revenue values based on the actual billing rate applied for the given date period. For example, if your billing rate changes from $100 to $110 on April 1st, the Estimated Labor Cost and Revenue calculations will use the $100 rate for all requirement hours prior to April 1st, and the $110 rate for all requirement hours on April 1st and beyond.
Workspace fields
Estimated Labor Cost
Estimated Labor Revenue
Planned and Actual Labor—The fields below are calculated using the current value of a billing rate. This includes calculations made for past costs and revenue. Billing rate history is not taken into consideration when calculating the following fields:
Workspace fields
Total Planned Labor Cost
Total Planned Labor Revenue
Total Actual Labor Cost
Task fields
Planned Labor Cost
Planned Labor Revenue