Help · Clients and projects

Budgets and alerts

A budget is a number of hours on a project. owntime watches it and tells you before the project quietly becomes unprofitable.

Setting one

Give a project a budget in hours. The Today screen shows a live bar for the projects closest to their limit, and Reports shows all of them with a percentage.

The four warnings

When a project crosses 75, 80, 90 or 100% of its budget, owntime says so, once per threshold. A project that jumps straight past several at once gets one alert at the highest rung, not four alerts in a row.

The ladder re-arms when usage drops back below 75%, or when you change the budget, since the old warning was measured against a different number. Relaunching the app does not re-send anything.

By email too, if you want

Settings → Budget email alerts lets the same warnings arrive in your inbox, using your own mail account. It only sends while owntime is running, since there is no server sitting around to do it for you.

Budgets are hours, not money

Deliberately. Hours are what you control while the work is happening; money depends on rates and scope, which change. A money budget would need updating every time a rate moved, and would be wrong within a month.

A fixed fee is a different thing again, and it prints on the invoice. A budget never does. Nobody sees a budget but you.

The conversation it is for

The 75% warning exists so you can tell a client “we are three quarters through the estimate” while there is still time to choose, rather than explaining an overrun after the fact.

Next: email alerts · reports · rates