Budgets, pricing and expenses

Budget lives on Project settings → Budget, deliberately away from the planning screens — pricing is set once and rarely touched, and mixing it into day-to-day task work helps nobody.

Pricing model

• Fixed fee — one agreed price for the whole job.
• Hourly — a rate, billed against logged time.

Your organisation's default hourly rate shows as a hint; the project's own rate always wins.

Payment notes is free text for anything notional ("50% up front, balance on delivery"). For terms you actually want tracked, use the payment schedule below.

Payment schedule

Break a fixed fee into terms — a percentage or a fixed amount, triggered on acceptance, on a phase completing, on a date, or on completion. Waymarq resolves each to real money against the fee and shows you what's scheduled, what's been received and what's overdue.

Mark a term paid when the money lands, recording the amount (part payments are fine) and a reference.

Cost so far

On an hourly project, Waymarq multiplies logged hours by the rate. On a fixed fee it deliberately doesn't — "cost so far" against a fixed price is a meaningless number, and showing one would invite the wrong conclusion.

Expenses

Switch Expenses on for a project (Project settings → Features) and you get a dedicated page for costs incurred on the job — stock photography, a font licence, materials, travel.

Each expense has a description, an amount, an optional incurred date and an optional person it's attributed to. The incurred date does real work: no date means planned, a date means actually spent. Only incurred expenses can be billed to a client — billing for money you haven't spent is how trust goes.

You can attach an expense to a work order, so billing that piece of work carries its costs with it.

What you can answer

• Am I over or under on this job?
• What have I spent, and what am I still expecting to spend?
• What's my effective hourly rate once absorbed work is counted?
• Across everything: the budget report lists every project with its pricing state.

What Waymarq deliberately doesn't do

There are no cost rates per person, so it can't calculate profit margin. The ceiling is agreed-versus-actual hours and revenue. That's an honest limit rather than a half-built figure.