Money in a team

Everyone's own price per hour, margin per member, and what you owe your people.

Partner margin

For a team of you and a partner, Bureau shows what you earn on their work. The formula is simple: paid out to the partner ÷ their paid hours = their rate. Project rate minus their rate is your margin per their hour; divided by the project rate — the "extra margin" percentage.

"Paid out" means an expense with a payee — a team member. An expense without a payee (fonts, subscriptions) never counts as a payout. Older expenses, recorded before this rule, are still recognised by the invoice mark in the note ("Invoice…").

One hour, two marks. The first comes from the client: they pay the invoice and the hours become "paid". The second comes from you: you transfer money to the member and their hours become "paid out". The line is drawn by a date, not by the amount: each payout has a date it covers hours through — by default, the payment date. If the member's invoice ended on the 28th and the money went out on the 3rd, set the 28th, or the hours in between silently become "paid out". The member's hours up to that date count as paid out, hours after it wait for their next invoice and show separately. Money is not spread across specific hours — that would take knowing their rate, and they know it, not you.

Margin is now counted per member: hours and payouts of all partners used to be lumped together. Paid hours are the member's entries up to the date the last payout covers: hours after it haven't been bought yet — they wait for their next invoice and show separately ("not paid out yet") — otherwise fresh hours would understate their rate. Subscriptions and other project expenses stay out of the margin — they show separately as "outside the margin". The project rate follows the era of each entry's date.

A person's rate

Everyone on the team can have their own price per hour — two, in fact. Cost is what you owe them for an hour of their work. Client rate is what the client pays for that same hour. Both optional, both in the project's currency, both set in Bureau → Team.

When a client rate is set, that person's hours are priced by it — everywhere money is counted: «invoiced», «unbilled», «the client owes», the report and the client link. When it isn't, the project rate on the entry's date applies, as before. The rate covers all of their hours and has no start date: if the terms differ, that's a different team with the same people.

You pay for what you sell: a non-billable hour costs nothing to anyone — not the client, not the person who worked it. If you want to pay for work you chose not to sell, keep the hour billable and simply never invoice it.

The client's invoice stays one sum. The breakdown — who earned what, their hours and their rate — lives in Bureau → Team next to margin: a partner's rate is your negotiating position and never travels to the client. What the client can see is hours per person, and only if you switch that block on.

The report also learned to price an hour by the rate era: it was the one place that re-priced past work at today's rate and drifted away from the client link.

Next: income and the rate you actually get, debt, advances and invoices, and all the calculation rules.