New Feature: Project Rate Cards!

In the professional services world, billable rates are constantly shifting in accordance with staff skills, competition, changing business costs, recommended fee schedules and even inflation!

With so many Accelo clients relying on the billable rates features, flexibility has become increasingly important. Today we've shipped another feature which adds a lot of flexibility to the rates system within the Projects module: Rate Cards.

What's so cool about rate cards?

1. They let you control which rates are available in the project.
2. They let you easily customize the amount charged for existing rates. This is much quicker than manually overriding the default rates on each milestone/task.
3. Even if you use a project template, the rate card can override those rates (just add the rate card first).
4. Bulk changes: If you've just finished setting up your project and need to tweak a couple of rates, do it easily from the rate card.
5. They work alongside the Divisions feature. In fact, if the client is in a division, the rate card will auto-populate with the default charge rates for that division!

Setting up a rate card

If you're using Accelo Premium, as the project manager (or Admin user) you can now enable the rate card for a project: Firstly select the Project menu on the task bar, then click Create Rate Card. A project can only have 1 rate card.

You'll notice a new Rates tab on the View Project screen. This is effectively the Rate Card for the project. It lists all available rates, allowing you to override the charge rate just for this project. You can also configure whether the rate will be available (Selectable) when editing rates within the project plan.

Once your rate card is set-up, you can edit the Project Plan and you'll see that the rates available there are exactly what you've configured in the rate card. Furthermore, if you drop in a project or milestone template, those rates will be adjusted according to the rate card.

If you don't want a rate from a template to change, then you'll need to ensure that your project rate card doesn't have a (custom) charged value set-up for that rate.

Note: Disabling a rate that is already in use in the project plan will not have any effect, since we can't just drop those rates that were in use. You'll need to edit any milestones/tasks that were using that rate and select a new rate. Once they've been updated, the disabled rate will be properly disabled.

Changing rates on the rate card: When you update the charged rate on the rate card, if it is already in use, you will be asked whether Accelo should automatically update all instances of that rate in the project plan - which may cause budgets to recalculate.