To create a blank project you could either click on the “+” icon on your menu…

…or on the project grid “create new project”

Project Settings

When creating a blank project you need to enter the project settings.

Automatically, it generates a project number. You can change it and you could also edit the default number groups for project. More here ➜

Also, you need to add project name and you could add a internal project description. Further, you need to pick a client. A project could be internal or for one client. Internal project cannot be invoiced. At last, add the repsonsible manager to the project. You could also add a substitute for the project manager.

You can change this data anytime in the project informations.

Project Options

On the project options you can make settings for communication and invoicing.

You can add this project to a slack or Microsoft Teams channel.

Further, you can set the project currency, default mileage rate, start and end date. Additionally, you can set the default view of your project either to board or list view

Regarding invoicing, you could set a prefix for the project’s invoices similar to client’s invoice prefix.

You could also enable to automatically round time records made with the time.

By default the unit in invoices for projects would be “hours”. However, you could also use “days” as unit. When using personal day as task unit you could set up how many hours equals one personal day. E.g. if you type it 8:00 hours equals a personal day and you’d tracked 16:00 hours to a task on the invoice you’d see 2 days.

Staff

You could add staff one by one, choosing departments or adding all staff members to a project.

Please note that staff added to the project is not automatically assigned to any task. However, if there’re task on the project you could either assign a person to all tasks or remove the person from all tasks with one click

Learn more about assign staff directly on a task ➜

That might be also helpful

Project billing methods ➜

Project budget ➜

Project custom fields ➜

1. Create a project from an estimate

You can create a project based on your estimate data.

To do this go to, estimate grid ➝ choose ‘Convert to Project’ on the row end menu ➝ enter the project name and click ‘Create Project’.
Note: If your estimate has a title, then the ‘Project Name’ field will have this value.

The project will include all tasks from the estimate.
Also, the tasks hours will be copied to the project as tasks budget hours (read more about project budget here).

2. View or edit a project

To view simple project reports and general project data go to, project grid (‘Time & Projects’ ➝ Projects) and click on a project name.

By clicking ‘Edit Project’ you can open and update the project page and change the project data.

3. What happens when I archive/delete a project?

You can archive/delete a project by marking the checkboxes of projects on the grid and clicking ‘Archive’ or ‘Delete’.

Staff members will not be able to log hours to archived or deleted projects.
The data and amount of archived projects will be included in your reports. Data from deleted projects will not be included in your reports.

– Budget

Shows the number of hours you have set as a budget on the Edit Project page:

– Total Hours

Displays how many hours are spent by all project members.

– Person Days

Time spent on this Project in Person Days:
Person Days = Total Hours/Person Day (hours)
For example:
Personal Days=9 hours/8 hours = 1.13 days

– Remaining Hours

Budget minus Total Hours (spent hours) = 50 – 9 = 41 hours

– Remaining Days

Remaining Hours/Person Day(hours) = 41/8 = 5.13 days.

How can I set hours in one Person Day

You can set how many hours should one Person Day have for your business by entering the number yourself in Settings -> Preferences, as shown below:

In Zistemo you can choose the project billing method “staff day rate”. The “staff day rate” interacts as a full day rate or half day rate. The billing is based on the daily rate of the staff.

Need the billing based on the daily rate of a daily Task summary? You can use Daily Task Rate instead.

Reasons to choose a daily staff rate:

Daily Staff rates is needed when on a project a staff member gets a day rate and it doesn’t matter on witch task he works. Let’s say Paula is a senior consultant and her daily rate is 2.500€ doesn’t matter if she prepares or moderate a sales training. Same with Peter, as a junior developer and his daily rate is 1.200€ and doesn’t matter if he is coding, testing, meet or doing some.

If you want to invoice by Tasks by day rates than use Daily Task Rate.

How to set it up “daily staff rate”?

In the Project Settings you can choose “staff day rate”

The option “ignore daily project time below 90 minutes” means that the added hours of the same day – which are less than “90mins” – will be ignored. Simply click on the number to change to your preferred minutes.

If you wish to use also a “half day rate” simply enable it via the checkbox. Change the hours to your preferred settings:

Behaviour – Billable / non-billable hours & Rounded Time

If you have two time entries: One billable and another non-billable on the same day, zistemo will only calculate the hours which are billable to the invoice:

ONLY billable times entries will be shown in the generated invoice and will take effect to the full/half day rate:

If you want to invoice also the non-billable hours of the specific day, you have to change the “task” from non-billable into billable hours. In this case you can then generate an invoice for another time entry, which zistemo will calculate also as one billable day:

Note: In this case, you will see on the project dashboard – 1 billable day – That’s zistemo’s current behaviour

Use half day rate

For staff day rates you can apply rates for half days.

Calculation with half days – Example:

Day #1: 4.5 hours tracked = 1 day
Day #2: 1 hour tracked = 0.5 day
Day #3: 1 hour tracked = 0.5 day
Day #4: 1 hour tracked = 0.5 day
Day#5: 1 hour tracked = 0.5 day

Billable days: 3.5 days (9.5 hours tracked)

Rounded Time

1 day = 8 hrs
1/2 day = 4 hours

E.g. You tracked 1.5 hrs for a day, then = 0.5 day rate. But in the system, we “round” the hours to 4 hrs (= half day) so rounded hours = +3.5 hrs

If you set up your day with 7 hours:
1 day = 7 hrs
1/2 day = 3.5 hours

If you set up your day with 6 hours:
1 day = 6 hrs
1/2 day = 3 hours

and so on…

Find also more infos about “rounded time HERE.
And “How to change working time” HERE.

How to generate the Staff Day Rate Invoice?

To generate the Invoice, go to project and click “Generate invoice”

If you want to generate an invoice for the project with billing method ‘staff day rate’ and your company also uses the option ‘approve timesheets’, then you must approve the timessheets before you generate an invoice. After approving the weekly timesheet from you staff, you can simply create the invoice.

Choose the “Date Range” which you want to show in the invoice:

You can easily change the “Date Range” for a specific month, day or however you feel like it. Just choose your preferred Date Range and press “Apply”.

If you generate an invoice for the project with the billing method ‘staff day rate’, zistemo will only show billable hours on this page and ignore the non-billable hours:

If you create your invoices in different currencies, we will show the already invoiced amount always in your base currency:

The invoice wizard recognized that you invoice this project with the daily task rate and open the Day Rate Invoice window with additional information. First the project summaries and the billable days. There is also the ability to change the days you want to invoice.

Please note: The current behaviour is: If you enter 1 instead of 2 days into the field. Zistemo will only show 1 billable day on the invoice BUT marks both days as billed in your project.