02 How Timix.AI fits
Phase and NTE budgets, utilization, and margin per discipline
The hierarchy, dual rates, and live budgets were built for work split into phases and disciplines, billed as fixed fee next to capped T&M — which is exactly how an engineering firm runs a project.
A budget on every phase, burning live
Structure a project as project → phase → work item: each phase is a Task under the project, with work items as SubTasks beneath. Give a phase its slice of the fee as a fixed-amount budget with soft and hard limits, and Timix.AI burns it down from live hours and alerts at the threshold you set — so you catch the CD phase at 82% of its fee while a change order for additional services is still defensible.
Budgets at Project, Task, or SubTask level; soft limits warn, hard limits stop — enforced at the moment of entry, not in next month's report.
T&M priced live, capped at the not-to-exceed
Run capped T&M discovery next to fixed-fee execution in one project tree. Each T&M hour computes as hours × customer rate, and an hour-cap (or fixed-amount) budget is your NTE — a soft limit warns the team near 80%, alert thresholds fire at the percentage you choose, and a hard limit blocks further entries at the ceiling.
3 billing types — T&M, Fixed Price, OVH — coexist in one tree; a T&M hour-cap budget acts as the not-to-exceed with soft/hard limits + alert thresholds.
Utilization, realization, and unbilled hours in view
Resource Utilization shows billable share by person against real per-user work schedules and regional holiday calendars — not a flat 2,080-hour denominator — so you see which disciplines and phases are under-utilized. Unbilled Time surfaces approved hours you haven't billed, and the Draft → Submitted → Approved workflow captures hours at the source instead of reconstructing them weeks later.
Utilization from per-user work schedules + regional holiday calendars; Unbilled Time report; approval workflow with reject-and-reason and history.
Discipline rates, real margin, invoice from approved time
Each person's hour carries a customer rate and a cost rate, so a principal, a PM, and a project engineer bill and cost at the right numbers, and profit rolls up per phase, per project, and per client. Cost rates are effective-dated, so a raise doesn't rewrite a finished project's margin — and on Professional and up, approved hours turn straight into a commercial invoice.
Dual customer + cost rates with effective-dated history → revenue/cost/profit/margin; approved hours → commercial invoice (Professional+).
3 billing types in one project tree — T&M, Fixed Price, Overhead
4 levels of margin roll-up — SubTask, Task, Project, Customer
Many report pages, including Resource Utilization and Unbilled Time
