Assigning times to projects or sites

If you want to know whether a job paid off, you need the hours on the job — not just on the month.

What the field is called for you

Zeitflex names it differently depending on the industry, but means the same thing:

The term comes from the industry template you chose during setup. If it does not fit, change it under Settings → Business — the term then appears everywhere, including in the app and in the export. For simplicity, this article uses “project”.

Step by step

1. Create a project. Open Projects and click New project at the top right — depending on the industry template it says New site, New route or New property. Only the Name is required (at least two characters); optional are customer, colour, hours budget, cost budget, net contract value, calculated hourly rate, Start and End (planned) as well as a note. Owners and managers may create projects, in every plan.
2. Assign when clocking. At the time clock in the browser and in the mobile app, the person chooses the project above the clock button: the most recently used projects are shown there as buttons, at most five; all others are behind Other projects …. If the business has no projects at all, nothing appears above the button. The selection applies to the current clock event. At the terminal there is no project selection — times clocked there are assigned retroactively.
3. Switching on the same day: clock out, switch project, clock in again. This creates two clean sections, each with its own assignment.
4. Assign retroactively: individually via Timesheet → Correct or in bulk via Projects → Assignment — both described in the next section.

The result: Every time entry carries its project. In the project analysis you see hours and labour costs per project, not just per person.

A project is never required when clocking. A business without projects clocks with a single tap as before; time without an assignment counts as general working time.

Assigning retroactively

There are two ways, and both are only open to owners and managers. Employees do not change the assignment of a saved entry themselves — they choose the project when clocking.

Single entry — Timesheet → Correct. Open the entry, change the project and enter a reason (at least 5 characters). This is a correction like any other: the old entry is kept as an earlier version, the new one carries the reason and the editor. See Correcting a forgotten clock entry.

Many entries at once — Projects → Assignment. This tab is built for the case where the overview says: “30 % of recorded time unassigned.”

1. Open Projects and the Assignment tab.
2. Set the period at the top of the page. In the tab, the checkbox Only unassigned times is ticked by default; untick it to also move incorrectly assigned entries. Next to it is Filter employees for searching for a person.
3. Tick the entries — up to 200 per run.
4. Under Target, choose the project. Archived projects are not available. The entry — Remove assignment — removes an existing assignment again.
5. Optionally a Reason. Without an entry, Zeitflex notes “Retroactive project assignment” or “Project assignment removed”.
6. Assign.

Zeitflex then reports three numbers: changed, skipped (the entry already had the target project) and locked. Locked means: the month of the entry is already closed for payroll or exported — these entries remain unchanged. If you still want to move them, take the route via Corrections after locking.

No entry is overwritten in the process. For each entry a new version is created with a reference to the old one; the log records before, after and reason. A retroactive cost assignment is a change to a record — it must be no less traceable than a time correction.

The Assignment tab is included in every plan, even without Pro. Assigning times is time recording, not analysis.

What Zeitflex analyses from it

The analysis under Projects is part of the Pro plan and only visible to owners and managers. Without Pro the project list remains, the four analysis tabs do not appear at all. It consists of:

• Project list — actual hours, labour costs and budget per project with a traffic light. Four states: No budget set (then the traffic light does not calculate), on track, at risk and exceeded. It switches to yellow when more than 90 % of the budget has been used, when the projection breaks the budget or when consumption runs ahead of the project's time progress by more than ten percentage points
• Post-calculation — what was planned and what became of it
• Ranking — contract value, contribution margin, margin and revenue per hour, sorted
• Comparison — the same period against the one immediately before it
• Productivity — share of project-bound time
• Export — not a tab of its own, but a button above the tabs: CSV in three scopes (per project, project × person, project × month), with semicolons and a comma as decimal separator for German Excel

A projection is only available for projects with a planned end; without this date, Zeitflex shows the actual state and says so.

How to read these numbers and what “paid off” means in concrete terms is explained in Was the job worth it?.

For salaried employees, Zeitflex derives an hourly rate from the monthly salary so that a project on which only salaried staff work does not show €0 costs.

Frequently asked questions

Does every entry need a project?

No. Without an assignment the time counts as general working time — correct, for example, for workshop work, everyday office work or journeys that belong to no one. In the analysis this time appears as its own row “unassigned” with its labour costs.

Can I merge projects retroactively?

Not in one go. The way: in the Assignment tab, untick Only unassigned times, tick the entries of the old project and assign them to the new one — up to 200 per run. Then archive the empty project. A project can only be permanently deleted as long as no times and no shifts are attached to it; otherwise Zeitflex only offers archiving, because the recorded times remain evidence.

Do the staff see the analysis?

No. Project list, post-calculation, ranking, comparison, productivity and export are seen only by owners and managers. Employees see the project list for selection when clocking and their own project on the entry.

A fitter clocked at the terminal all day but worked on two sites.

No project is chosen at the terminal, so there is an entry without an assignment. Split it via Timesheet → Correct into two sections and give each its project — with a reason. For the future: anyone who switches between sites clocks on their phone and chooses the project there.

Still stuck?

Write to support. If you bring an existing project list with you, import it: Importing data knows the data type “Projects”. What the numbers mean in the end is explained in Was the job worth it?.