An effective way to charge customers for your team's work on their projects is using Rate cards for time and material projects. This approach involves creating rate cards, which details the hourly billing rates of the team members who will be working on customer projects. By utilizing rate cards, you can avoid discrepancies in the billing process when invoicing customers.
The rate card contains the bill rates for specific project roles like designer, engineer, etc. You can create multiple rate cards, for your different service offerings or products.
Using Rocketlane's Rate cards along with the time tracking feature, you can estimate the charges your customers should pay for the time your team spends on their projects. This is essential to ensure that your revenue is accurately tracked.
In this article
Components of a rate card and what they mean:
| Name | Name your rate card to suit its purpose (example: Enterprise rate card) |
| Versions | If you wish to revise your rate cards owing to your business growth, you can create new versions of existing rate cards and set an effective date. |
| Roles | Assigned roles of your team members |
| Rates | Standard hourly rates to bill customers for the role |
| Default Rate | If the bill rate is missing for a specific role in a project, the system uses the Default rate for that role |
| Effective date | The date at which a version of the rate card becomes available |
Rate card Versions
| Active Version | The rate card presently active and available to be used in new projects |
| Upcoming Version | The upcoming version of the rate card that will take effect based on the set effective date |
| Past Version | These are previous versions of the rate card that cannot be used in new projects |
| Add Currency |
Creating Rate cards
To enable rate cards for your projects,
Navigate to your profile icon, click on settings
Under Operations and Finances, select Rate Cards
Click on New card+
Name your card and select the effective date from when the rate card takes effect.
Select the currencies you want to use in projects that utilize this rate card.
Start adding roles to the rate card and set the bill rates ($/hour)
Toggle the Rate card to use it in your projects.
Note: You cannot add currency to an active version of the rate card
Creating new versions of rate cards
If you need to update your pricing due to the growth of your business, you can make new versions of your existing rate cards and choose an effective date. The upcoming version of the rate cards will be applied for projects created on or after the effective date. It's important to note that only one version of the rate card can be active at any given time and will be used while creating new projects.
Note 1: You cannot make changes to the past and active versions of the rate card. However, you can make changes to the upcoming version of the rate cards, until it becomes active.
Note 2: Once a new version of the rate cards becomes active, any projects using the past version will continue to use that version, unless changed explicitly.
To create a new version of the rate card,
Click and open an existing rate card
Click on + next to Versions
Set the Effective Date as the date from which the version of rate card should apply to new projects
Start modifying the rates under Bill rates ($/hour) for all the roles or specific ones.
Once done, click Create
Disabling a rate card
If you wish to disable any of your rate cards that are outdated and not in use anymore,
Navigate to your profile icon, click on settings
Under Operations and Finances, select Rate Cards
Here, you will see the list of rate cards and toggle button next to each rate card
Toggle off the rate card that you wish to disable.
