Rates & profitability
Put a number on your time, then see revenue, cost, and margin behind every hour — and who's allowed to.
Tracking hours tells you where time went. Adding rates tells you what those hours are worth — and whether the work is actually profitable.
Two kinds of rate
- Bill rate — what you charge the client. Drives revenue.
- Cost rate — what the time costs you (usually a person's loaded cost). Drives cost, and with it profit and margin.
You can set either without the other. A bill rate alone gives you revenue; add cost rates to unlock profitability (see Cost rates & margin).
Each entry is priced at the rate in effect on the day it was worked. So when you change a rate, you choose how it lands: to all time (retroactive — past and future hours re-price) or only from a date (earlier hours keep the old rate). A new rate covers all time by default, and you can still schedule one to start on a future date.
The rate hierarchy
Every entry resolves to exactly one bill rate and one cost rate. ProjectPacer looks from most specific to most general and takes the first it finds:
A single rate can pin more than one scope — a rate for this person on this client is more specific than either alone, so it wins where both apply. The resolver adds up the scopes each rate pins and the most specific one wins; it never blends two separate rates together. See Task-type rates.
Coverage (in settings) shows where rates are missing, so no billable hour slips through unpriced — see Rate coverage.
What the money means
Once rates are set, these appear on Reports and each engagement:
- Revenue — recognized differently by engagement type: hourly work is hours × bill rate; a fixed fee or retainer is recognized pro-rata over the contract's elapsed time (or per milestone). A not-to-exceed cap limits it.
- Effective $/hr — what you're actually realizing per hour. On a fixed engagement that's recognized revenue ÷ hours used; on a report it's revenue ÷ all hours worked. It's the number that reveals a "good" rate quietly eroding.
- Profit & margin — revenue minus cost, when cost is complete. See Cost rates & margin.
Seeing billing (revenue, bill rates) and seeing costs (cost rates, profit, margin) are separate permissions, set per role on Roles & permissions. Owners and admins have both; a manager sees billing but not costs; members and viewers see neither. A teammate without them tracks time normally and simply won't see money columns — that's intended, not a bug.
Where to add rates so nothing goes unpriced.
Find the gaps before they understate your numbers.