A project is one engagement for one customer: the retainer, the implementation, the audit. It is numbered from its own sequence (PRJ-001 and on) and everything in this chapter hangs on it — entries name it, approvals follow its manager, billing gathers by it, and the profitability report reads it whole.
A project is opened with its customer, its manager (an employee — one of the people who can approve its time), and its billing method, which is chosen once and shapes everything downstream:
- Time and materials — bill the hours actually worked, at the entry's rate.
- Fixed price — bill against an agreed price, in progress, never past it (§9.5, fixed-price billing).
- Non-billable — track the time and its cost, invoice nothing. Internal and goodwill work lives here honestly instead of pretending it will be billed one day.
Only an active project takes new time: a project put on hold or marked completed stops appearing in the entry form's picker, while everything already recorded against it stays readable and billable as before.