Why is my project's billable amount 0?

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There could be a few reasons this is happening:

  • Your project may not be billable.
  • Your project may be set to billable but not have any billable tasks.
  • Your project may have billable tasks, but you do not have rates entered for the tasks/people/project.

Your project may not be billable

If you’re seeing 0 for the billable amount on your project, the first step is to make sure that the project is billable. From the project’s settings, make sure that the Project type is set to Time & Materials and that you’ve chosen to invoice by project, person, or task billable rate.

Screenshot of the New/Edit Project page for a Time & Materials project with the Task Hourly Rate billing method selected

The No billable rate option will not result in a billable amount, since Harvest calculates billable amounts by multiplying rates x hours worked.

Note that if your project is a Fixed Fee project, the project analysis page will never display a billable amount in the summary information on the top half of the page. If the project has a fee-based budget, the Tasks and Team tabs on the bottom half of the page will have an If billed hourly column to show what the billable amount would be if it were a Time & Materials project.

Along the same lines, the summary time report won’t show a billable amount for Fixed Fee projects by default, but you can choose to display a “hypothetical” billable amount, as described in this article.

Your project may be set to billable but not have any billable tasks (or time was tracked to a non-billable task)

Once you’ve checked that your Time & Materials project has a billable rate option selected, you’ll want to make sure that the project has tasks marked as billable. Time tracked to non-billable tasks won’t generate a billable amount.

Billable checkbox

Your project may have billable tasks, but you don’t have rates entered for the tasks/people/project

Check your project to make sure you have billable rates entered. If you’re invoicing by project billable rate, enter the rate in the Project type section of the project’s settings; if you’re invoicing by task or person billable rate, check the billable rates entered in the Tasks or Team section for the project, respectively.

Billable rates

Note: When you add/change default rates for tasks (from Manage > Tasks), those rates will only be applied to new projects created going forward. If you have already existing projects, check each project’s settings page to make sure the rates are correct.

If you’ve checked all of these possibilities and are still seeing a billable amount of 0, contact us with the name of the client and project causing the trouble and we’ll be happy to take a look!

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