Be aware: Rates are always calculated from the duration of a record. The duration is often a rounded value and not the real difference between end and begin.

There are two rate types:

• Hourly rate: will be used to calculate the records rate by multiplying it with the duration (see below)
• Fixed rate: the value will be used to set the rate for every record, no matter how long the duration is

If any of the above is set to 0, the records rate will be set to 0. A fixed rate always wins over an hourly rate.

And there are two different rates for each time-record:

• The regular hourly rate defines the external costs for yor customer (what actually goes on an invoice)
• And the internal rate defines your costs for the accounted work (what your employees costs you)

Defining rates

Rates can be defined in 4 different places;

• on the user level (in the user preferences)
• on the customer level
• on a project level
• and on the activity level

The values on the user level should always be filled, as they are the last place where Kimai always looks for a rate, if no other could be found.

The other rate settings (customer, project, activity) allow to define multiple rates. Each customer/project/activity can have one rate setting, that acts as global fallback (if the username is not chosen) for every user, who has no dedicated rate for this object. For example: a customer gets a global rate of 10€, and you additionally create one rate for user A for 20€. Now that means A will have the rate of 20€, but user B and C and D will have a rate to 10€.

Internal rate

If you leave the “internal rate” empty on customer/project/activity level, the “internal rate user-preference” will be used as fallback.

Changing rates

Rate changes always only apply for future entries. If you change e.g. a user’s hourly rate, it will be used for all timesheet records that will be created from now on. But existing records will not be changed retroactive.

Rate changes upon item changes

If a record already has an hourly or fixed rate set, it will be re-calculated if you change one of these fields:

• customer
• project
• activity
• user

As all of these fields can have different rate settings. the time-records rate will be recalculated as well.

So if Project A has a rate of 100 and Project B a rate of 120, and you move a time-record from A to B it will automatically be changed from 100 to 120.

Rate calculation

The algorithm to calculate a timesheet records rate works by summing up scores, where the highest score wins:

• Activity rate: 5 points
• Project rate: 3 points
• Customer rate: 1 points
• User specific rate: +1 point

This leads to the following decision matrix:

	Activity rate	Project rate	Customer rate
None-user rule	5	3	1
User specific	6	4	2

If no rate can be found, the users hourly-rate preference will be used to calculate the records rate. In case that the users hourly-rate is not set or equals 0, the records rate will be set to 0.

The timesheet rate calculation is based on the following formula:

• Fixed rate: $fixedRate
• Hourly rate: $hourlyRate * ($durationInSeconds / 3600) * $factor

You find more information how and where you can edit the different rates types in the following chapters.

Related articles

• Timesheet
• Customer
• Projects
• Activities
• User preferences