How clients, projects and tasks fit together

A Temponia workspace is built from four things and one connection between them. A client owns projects. A task is linked to a project. A person is assigned to a project. Time is booked against one project and task pair.

Everything downstream, the rates you can charge, the budgets you can set, the questions your reports can answer and the invoices you can raise, follows from that shape. It is worth understanding once.

The chain

• A client is an organisation you work for. It owns any number of projects.
• A project belongs to at most one client. It can also stand alone, which is useful for internal work.
• A task is a kind of work, defined once for the whole workspace: design, development, travel. Tasks do not belong to a project. They become available on a project by being linked to it, which is what the Project's tasks panel on the project page does.
• An assignment says who is allowed to work on a project, and which of them is a project manager. That is the Users assigned panel.
• A time entry always points at exactly one project and task pair, and one person. There is no way to book time to a project without choosing a task.

Setting this up step by step is covered in setting up projects and tasks.

Tasks are shared, their rates are not

Because a task is defined once and reused, the same task appears on many projects. Each link keeps its own rate and its own budget, so design can be charged at one rate on one project and a different rate on another without creating two tasks.

Renaming a task renames it everywhere, which is a feature when you are standardising and a nuisance when you were treating a task as a project-specific label. If a name only makes sense on one project, it probably wants to be a project rather than a task.

A task marked Common is linked to every active project, and every project you create afterwards picks up all common tasks automatically. A new workspace starts with exactly one, named General, which is why a brand new project already has something to book against.

Assignment decides what people see

Someone's timesheet offers the tasks of the projects they are assigned to, and nothing else. A person with no assignment is told they are not assigned to any projects or tasks, and has nothing to book against, however many projects exist.

Removing somebody from a project deactivates the assignment rather than erasing it, so the hours they already tracked stay intact and keep appearing in reports and on invoices.

Why the hierarchy matters

Rates

A project's Billable setting names the level the rate is read from: Not billable, By project rate, By task rate or By person rate. You are picking a level in the hierarchy, not a number. Set it to By task rate and the rate on each task link is what counts; set it to By person rate and the rate on each assignment is. See rates and who gets charged what.

Budgets

Budgets work the same way. A project can be budgeted on total hours or total fees, or per task, or per person. A budget per task is only meaningful because tasks are attached to the project individually. See budgets and tracking progress.

Reporting

Every entry carries its client, project, task and person, so reports can group by any of them and drill from one into the next. This is why the task you choose at the moment of entry matters more than it looks: it is the only dimension nobody can reconstruct afterwards. See the pivot table.

Invoicing

Invoices are addressed to a client, and uninvoiced work is gathered per client and per project. A project without a client will never appear there, so internal projects stay out of the way, and a billable project needs its client set before you can invoice it. See creating an invoice.

Archiving works downwards

Clients, projects, tasks and users are archived rather than deleted, which is what keeps old reports intact. Archiving is reversible; deleting is a separate, confirmed action offered only on records that are already archived, and it takes related items with it.

Archiving a client takes its projects with it. Every project of that client is archived at the same time, and its tasks stop appearing on anyone's timesheet. If time suddenly cannot be booked to a project that still looks active, check whether its client was archived.