When charging for time, sometimes you may need to charge different billable hourly rates for different clients. For example, you offered one set of rates to a client a year ago and their project is still ongoing and you'd like to honor their original rates although your prices have increased or some employees received raises. Using Rate Locks for projects, you can ensure that on a given project, you lock-in the rates for any hours tracked to that project.

The rates can be specific to individual employees, and even to specific activities the employees engage in, such as design, travel, procurement, management, or any other activity you've defined for your team's time tracking.

First, navigate to the project.

The hourly rates are managed in the Invoicing section of the project, where you'll be creating invoices to bill clients for your time.

This will bring up the options for what rates will be used on this project's invoices. You can either use the "Current Rates" (which is whatever today's rates are and can fluctuate whenever you adjust them for your employees) or "Locked-In Rates", which will let you specify exact amounts per hour for this project only.

This will expand a rate table where you can define rates for each employee who works on this project. Whenever anyone logs time to this project, this rate table will take precedence to determine what amount to charge.

Rates are set for each person who works on the project.

You can define particular rates for each activity, if needed, or just set specific baseline hourly rates for each person who works on this project. If a rate isn't defined for an employee here, Materio will fall back to using their current rate.

You can lock in the rates for as many employees and activities as needed. Any time they track towards this project will be billed at these rates.

These locked-in rates will now apply to any new hours your team tracks against this project.