Keep projects profitable without Excel time sheets

Excel-style bulk entry lets your team log project hours with direct mapping to project, phase and activity. Employees enter the whole week in five minutes on Friday, and tab and arrow keys work just like in Excel. For everyone who prefers to log hours live, there is a browser timer and a mobile app: the timer starts at login, runs in the background and assigns time to the active project automatically. Time accounts, overtime and vacation are synchronised with the HR module, so nothing has to be maintained twice. Mandatory fields per project are configurable, and the AI helper suggests activity descriptions based on your past entries. Weekly release by the employee, approval by the project lead and the billing handover to the finance module all run through a structured workflow. Corrections and reversals stay traceable, which keeps GoBD compliance and the audit trail intact. External freelancers log their hours through the same workflow, so your billing preparation cleanly separates internal and external work. That matters for correct profit determination and for reverse-charge handling with EU freelancers.

For each project you define a budget in hours and euros, and the system calculates target versus actual every day using hourly rate and cost rate. At 80% budget consumption you get a notification, at 100% the project is marked red and activities are escalated. You see the margin per project live, and the AI helper warns early when a project is going off track and suggests concrete actions such as scope reduction, renegotiation or resource reallocation. Fixed-price projects and hourly-rate projects are handled separately. You see the burn rate per week and planned versus actual figures, and you can adjust the early-warning thresholds for each project. Multi-year projects get phase budgets with their own thresholds, so a runaway concept phase doesn't only show up at the end. The AI helper calculates Estimate-to-Complete (ETC) from historical data and the current burn, which tells you whether the remaining budget will be enough. Change requests and addenda are booked separately, so you can measure margin erosion through scope creep and calculate more accurately in your next quote.

You plan employees on projects week by week, and the system shows utilisation per person and department in a heatmap. Overload (above 100%) and idle time (below 60%) are visible at a glance in the capacity heatmap, and the AI helper suggests how to distribute resources based on skills, availability and project priority. Vacations and sick notes from the HR module flow into the planning automatically, so there are no nasty surprises on Monday morning. Skills are maintained centrally per employee, which means resource planning for a frontend project won'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. Those external freelancers live in the same system, complete with hourly rate, availability and skills.

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

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

For each project you see budget, margin, hours, tasks and the 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. It is Qwen3-based, self-hosted in the EU and learns from your project portfolio without any data flowing out to US cloud services. Management gets a portfolio view across all projects with margin ranking, early-warning flags and a forecast for the quarter. You can drill down from the portfolio to a single hour entry in two clicks, so no Excel export is 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, covering booked hours, next milestones and open items, are exported at the press of a button.