Keep projects profitable without Excel time sheets

Excel-style bulk entry for project hours with direct mapping to project, phase and activity — employees log the week in five minutes on Friday, tab and arrow keys work like in Excel. Live tracking via mobile app and browser timer for those who prefer to log hours live — timer starts at login, runs in the background and assigns to the active project automatically. Time accounts, overtime and vacation are synchronised with the HR module — no dual maintenance. Mandatory fields per project are configurable, the AI helper suggests activity descriptions from your past entries. Weekly release by the employee, approval by the project lead and billing handover to the finance module run through a structured workflow. Corrections and reversals are traceable, so GoBD and audit trail remain intact. External freelancers also log hours through the same workflow, so your billing preparation cleanly separates internal and external work — important for correct profit determination and reverse-charge handling for EU freelancers.

Per project you define budget in hours and euros, the system calculates target-actual daily with hourly rate and cost rate. At 80% budget consumption you get a notification, at 100% the project is marked red and activities are escalated. Margin per project you see live — the AI helper warns early when a project is going off track and suggests concrete actions: scope reduction, renegotiation, resource reallocation. Fixed-price projects and hourly-rate projects are handled separately. You see burn rate per week, planned versus actual, and can adjust early-warning thresholds per project. For multi-year projects there are phase budgets with their own thresholds, so a runaway concept phase doesn't only show up at the end. Estimate-to-Complete (ETC) is calculated by the AI helper from historical data and current burn — you see whether the remaining budget is enough. Change requests and addenda are booked separately, so you can measure margin erosion through scope creep and calculate better in the next quote.

Plan employees on projects week by week, the system shows utilisation per person and department in a heatmap. Overload (above 100%) and idle time (below 60%) you see in the capacity heatmap, the AI helper suggests resource distribution — based on skills, availability and project priority. Vacations and sick notes from the HR module flow into planning automatically — no nasty surprises Monday morning. Skills per employee you maintain centrally, so resource planning for a frontend project doesn't suggest the DevOps specialist. Target-actual reconciliation between planned and booked utilisation runs daily. For bottlenecks you see which skills are scarce, so you can recruit specifically or bring in external freelancers. External freelancers you maintain in the same system with hourly rate, availability and skills.

Captured hours you bundle by project, phase or employee and hand them over to the finance module for invoicing. Hourly rate per employee or per project role is configurable, fixed-price projects are handled separately with milestone-based billing. Cost rate for internal margin calculation runs in the background — employees see only hourly rate, management both values, secured via Postgres Row-Level Security. Multiple hourly rates for different activities within the same project (consulting €180/h, development €120/h, support €90/h) are possible. Billing preview shows you what the customer receives before export. For long-running projects with monthly billing, the billing run at month-end runs automatically — hours bundled, preview checked, released, invoice sent. Lump sums for travel costs or material can also be mapped as positions.

Plan tasks with owner, due date and estimate. Milestones trigger notifications and billing steps, dependencies between tasks are visualised. The AI helper suggests task breakdown from project descriptions and estimates effort based on past projects — for a webshop project it recognises typical phases like concept, design, development, testing and suggests hour estimates. For trades there is a simplified job mode without Gantt-chart overkill — jobs with hours, material and employee mapping, done. Task status you optionally synchronise with Jira or Asana. Comments and attachments per task keep the project context together, so you don't search in email threads. Reminders and follow-ups reduce the risk that tasks get lost in open lists.

Per project you see budget, margin, hours, tasks and next milestones in one dashboard. The AI helper answers questions like 'How much budget do I have left?', 'Who is overloaded this week?' or 'Which task is blocking the next milestone?' directly in the chat. Mistral-based, EU-hosted, learns from your project portfolio without data outflow to US cloud services. Management sees a portfolio view across all projects with margin ranking, early-warning flags and forecast for the quarter. Drill-down from portfolio to single hour entry in two clicks — no Excel export needed for the steering committee. In the weekly review you open the dashboard, go through the early-warning flags and prioritise actions. Customer reports with selective release — hours booked, next milestones, open items — you export at the press of a button.