Time and money
Hourly rates
How Orin OS chooses the rate for each hour: task, engagement, person on a client, then your rate card.
Hourly rates decide what an hour of logged time is worth on an invoice. This article explains how Orin OS chooses a rate for each hour. Setting the business's own rate card is covered in Hourly rates (setup).
Which rate wins
An hour can be priced in four places. Orin OS uses the first of these that has a rate:
- The task. A rate agreed for that piece of work.
- The engagement. A rate agreed with the client for the service.
- One person, on that client. A rate for a particular member of staff on a particular client, set on the client's Staff tab.
- Your rate card. The business's own rates, in Hourly rates.
A premium on the rate card never overrides a rate agreed with the client, so no client is billed a figure their engagement letter does not mention.
The four kinds of day
- Standard. An ordinary working day.
- Overtime. Used only when an approver marks approved time as overtime. See Timesheet.
- Weekend. Days outside your working week.
- Bank holiday. A public holiday or one of your own closure days.
If there is no Weekend or Bank holiday rate, that work is priced at the Standard rate rather than at nothing. Overtime has no fallback: without an Overtime rate, approved time cannot be marked as overtime. With no Standard rate, work with no rate agreed anywhere else is priced at nothing.
Which days are weekends and holidays comes from Working calendar, not from the rate card. If a weekend rate appears on a day you consider ordinary, check the calendar.
Currency
Rates are in your business's currency, which comes from its jurisdiction: euro for Ireland, sterling for the United Kingdom.
Common questions
Does changing a rate re-price work already logged? No. Each hour is priced at the rate in force on the day the work was done, so last quarter's work keeps last quarter's rate. A change applies from the day it is made.
Can one client have different rates? Yes. Agree a rate on the engagement or the task, or set a rate for a person on that client's Staff tab. The rate card is the fallback.
Who can change the rate card? People who can manage the business's settings. Others cannot see the rate card at all.
Some hours show no value in reports. No rate applied to them anywhere. Time analysis says how many hours that affects.