Fixed-fee & fixed-price projects
On a flat fee, you don't bill by the hour — but every hour past the estimate is margin you're giving away. Timix.AI tracks effort against the fee in real time, warns you before you blow it, and tells you whether each fixed-price project actually made money.
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Illustrative entries
01 The problem
Hourly work bills the overrun; fixed-fee work absorbs it. The fee is set, the scope drifts, and the gap between the two is your profit quietly draining away — usually invisible until the project closes.
The contract amount is fixed, but without effort burning down against it live, "how much of the fee have we used?" is a question you can only answer after the fact. By then the answer is no longer actionable — it's just the post-mortem.
An extra round here, a "small" addition there. On T&M each of those would be a line item; on a fixed fee they're silent. Without a live budget and a threshold alert, scope creep doesn't surface until the margin it ate is already gone.
If profit on a fixed-fee project is only knowable once it's closed, you can't price the next one from real data and you can't intervene on this one. You're flying every fixed-fee engagement on instinct.
02 How Timix.AI fits
The Fixed Price billing type, budgets with soft and hard limits, and dual-rate profitability were built for exactly this: protecting margin on work where the price can't move.
Set a project (or a task, or a subtask) to Fixed Price and Timix.AI tracks the contract amount against the cost of the hours going in — not hours times a rate. You see committed effort against the fee, the way fixed-fee work actually behaves.
Fixed Price billing type tracks contract amount vs cost; it coexists with T&M and Overhead in one tree.
Give the project a fixed-amount or hour-cap budget and set soft and hard limits. The soft limit warns; the hard limit stops further entries. Timix.AI computes burn from live hours, so the alert lands while there's still fee left to protect — these limits govern time entry, not billing.
Budgets at Project, Task, or SubTask level; soft warns, hard stops, enforced at the moment of time entry.
Pick the point that matters — 70%, 85%, wherever your nerve gives out — and Timix.AI raises an alert as live hours cross it. Budget health shows on the dashboard, in reports, and through Timix.AI, so "are we over?" is always answerable.
Configurable alert thresholds; budget health computed from live hours, surfaced on dashboard, reports, and the AI assistant.
Every hour carries a customer rate and a cost rate, so even on a flat fee Timix.AI rolls up real revenue, cost, profit, and margin per project. You finally bid the next fixed fee from what the last one actually cost.
Dual rates roll revenue, cost, profit, and margin up from SubTask to Project to Customer.
03 Try it on a real fee
Create a workspace, add a fixed-price project, set its fee as a budget with a threshold, and log a few hours against it. Watch the fee burn down and the alert arm on your own numbers — full access, every report, for 90 days, no card.
90-day free trial, full access, no credit card.
Want to see it on data that's already there? Live, pre-seeded demo workspaces are open to everyone — the construction and IT-services organizations both have fixed-price projects mid-burn. Open the IT-services demo
04 FAQ
You still log hours — they just measure effort against the fee instead of producing a bill. Set the project to Fixed Price and give it a budget; Timix.AI burns that budget down from live hours so you can see how much of the fee you've spent at any moment.
The soft limit raises a warning at a threshold you set; the hard limit stops further time entries on that budget. They govern time entry — they're a guardrail on effort, not an invoicing or billing control.
Yes. Each hour carries a customer rate and a cost rate, so revenue, cost, profit, and margin roll up per project even on a flat fee. The Budget vs Actual and Project Analysis reports export to PDF or CSV.
Timix.AI generates commercial invoices from tracked effort on Professional and up, but it doesn't recognize revenue — it tracks effort and margin against the fee and exports billing-ready data for whatever you account with.
Ready when you are
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