Concepts overview
Written By Lauri Eurén
Last updated 17 days ago
This is the index to Operating's concepts: every core term in one line, with a link to its full explanation. It follows how Operating's data is layered — who and what (entities), when (planning), value (financials), and what actually happened (records) — with each layer building on the one below. For the formulas behind the numbers, see the Metrics glossary.
On this page, each concept's full explanation lives in its own article, linked below — this index only points to them, so each idea is explained in exactly one place. Most concepts sit with their feature in Features & how-tos; the cross-feature ones stay here in Concepts & metrics.
Organization foundations
The building blocks an admin sets up once. These mostly live in Set up & administer › Foundations.
Concept | In one line | Where it lives |
Your whole Operating account — every setting, permission, and record is scoped to it. ("Tenant" is the internal name for the same thing.) | ||
A legal entity inside your organization with its own invoicing setup; every Project and Person belongs to one. Multi-company orgs can invoice separately. | ||
A location (office or region) used to organize people and projects and to vary rates by location in a Rate card. | ||
An organizational unit — department or team — for categorizing, filtering, and permissions; people, projects, and positions can be in several groups. | ||
A flexible label for categorizing and filtering projects, clients, or people, beyond fixed structures like Site or Group. | ||
A job function like Developer or Designer; drives Rate card pricing and what someone does on a Project. A Person can hold several, one primary. | ||
A level (e.g. Junior, Senior) attached to a Role that further refines Rate card pricing. | ||
A specific capability (e.g. React) assigned to people and Positions to help match the right person to work. | ||
A state on an entity — e.g. a Project's lifecycle status, or an Allocation being tentative vs. confirmed. |
People and access
Concept | In one line | Where it lives |
A Person is anyone in your org who can be staffed and track time; a User is a Person with login access. A Person can exist without a User. | ||
A Person not on your payroll (freelancer or contractor); if they log in, their Permission set is usually limited to time tracking. | ||
A named bundle of permissions assigned to a User that controls what they can see and do (e.g. Admin, Project Manager, Time Tracker). | ||
An optional rule that routes submitted (locked) time to approvers — by project owner, manager, or group — before it's finalized. | ||
How much time a Person is available each day — their individual working hours when set, otherwise the Site default, reduced by weekends, time off, and holidays. Drives capacity, cost, and revenue. |
Projects
Concept | In one line | Where it lives |
The core unit of work — Client (billable), Internal, or Time off. Carries billing type, currency, owner, dates, and holds Positions, Budgets, time, and Expenses. | ||
The customer company buying your services; every billable Project has one. | ||
The Person responsible for a Project — often the sales lead early on, then the project manager. A secondary owner can share that responsibility. | ||
A Position is a role a Person holds on a Project; an Allocation is a block of planned time on that Position. One Position can have many Allocations. | ||
Named stages within one Project (Design, Build, Launch) that organize the team and time. An organizing layer only — phases carry no budgets or rates. | ||
An optional, finer-grained unit of work within a Project that time can be tracked against; a Task can carry its own billing rate. Tasks group into task lists. | ||
A rough early guess at when work begins and ends, used for initial planning and later overridden by Allocations and time. |
Planning and scheduling (when work happens)
Concept | In one line | Where it lives |
Tentative vs. confirmed allocations | Tentative work is planned but uncertain and may change; confirmed work is committed. The split drives capacity planning and forecasting. | |
How likely tentative work is to happen, as a percentage, so reports can weight pipeline hours and revenue; confirmed work always counts in full. | ||
How much of a Person's working time is available, shown as percentage booked against percentage available, after subtracting time off. | ||
The share of available working time spent on chosen work — by default billable client work; the formula is configurable. | ||
Staffing | The recurring process of defining open Positions and finding the right people for them — including filling the bench proactively. | |
A special Time off Project for holidays, vacation, and leave; entries can be managed in Operating or imported from an HRIS. |
Financials (economic value)
Concept | In one line | Where it lives |
A monetary amount assigned to a Project for a date range — the agreed value of the work, and the target it's measured against. Sets or caps revenue on fixed-price and capped T&M Projects. | ||
How a Project is billed: time-and-materials (per hour), capped T&M, fixed-price, or non-billable. It determines how revenue is calculated. | ||
Billable work and expenses can be charged to a Client and generate revenue; non-billable is internal and generates none but still costs. | ||
A Rate card is a pricing table setting billing rates by Role, seniority, and Site; the rate falls back from position-specific → card → base → global average. | ||
The internal cost rate (what a Person's time costs you) falls back from a project override → individual cost rate → an external default or Site/Role/seniority cost card → default. | ||
Project budgeting and profitability | Profitability is revenue earned minus delivery cost, read as a margin against the Budget; what to watch differs by billing type. | |
Budget progress | A manually entered completion percentage used as an optional input to the time-based revenue recognition method. | |
Expense budget | A per-category envelope inside a Budget (e.g. travel, software) for planning non-time costs; a planning guide that doesn't itself change revenue. | |
Out of budget scope | On capped T&M, the amount by which work value exceeds recognized revenue once the budget cap is reached — distinct from non-billable. | |
A non-time project cost, optionally billable and invoiced; categories standardize handling and markup, and a vendor records who it was paid to. | ||
Invoicing schedule | The pattern for when a Project's invoices are created — monthly, weekly, or on completion. |
Records (what actually happened)
Concept | In one line | Where it lives |
A single unit of time tracking — a Person's hours on a Project for one date, optionally tied to a Task and Position. Feeds earned revenue, cost, and utilization. | ||
Finalizes a Person's hours up to a chosen date and locks those days, marking them Submitted and ready to review, approve, and bill. Reversible with permission. | ||
An option that rounds tracked durations up to a set interval for billing, while always keeping both the actual and rounded time. | ||
The running difference between a Person's expected and tracked time over a period — positive means they've tracked more than expected. | ||
A billing document capturing selected time entries and billable expenses for a Client; prices can be adjusted at creation, so invoiced revenue can differ from earned. | ||
Credit note | A reversing document that cancels or corrects a sent invoice; the usual fix is a credit note plus a corrected invoice. |
Cross-feature concepts (kept here in Concepts & metrics)
These span planning, time, financials, and invoicing at once, so they don't sit under any one feature.
Concept | In one line | Where it lives |
How much of a Budget a Project has earned over time — by the recognition method (evenly, weighted by hours and rates, by time, or cost-to-cost). | ||
A project's projected outcome at completion: actuals before a cut-off date plus the plan after it, for revenue, cost, gross profit, and margin. | ||
How the plan (Allocations and Budgets) compares against what actually happened (tracked time and Expenses) — the basis for every variance report. |
The numbers
Every computed metric — utilization, capacity, revenue, cost, gross profit, margin, earned vs. invoiced revenue, planned revenue and cost, and forecast values — is defined with its formula in one place.
Metrics glossary — the formulas behind Operating's numbers.
Integrations
Concepts that come from connected systems rather than Operating itself.
Concept | In one line | Where it lives |
CRM deal and pipeline | A sales opportunity moving through pipeline stages in your CRM; shown against its Project in Operating but managed in the CRM. A won deal can seed a Project. | |
External project | The name a Time entry's project has in an upstream system (issue tracking, an accounting system); a read-only label for tracing an entry to its source. |
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