How do I book time against projects and track the budget?
A project belongs to a client and carries a number, name, term, owners and a budget. It is a booking dimension: times are booked against it and can be reported against it. It does not keep tasks, milestones or a percentage of progress.
As at:September 2026
What a project is here, and what it is not
A project in MetronHR is a booking dimension with a term and a budget. It collects times and makes them reportable.
It is not a container for work items. It has no tasks, no milestones, no percentage of progress and no dependencies between items. Anyone looking for a project management tool will not find it here, and that is a decision and not a backlog item.
Creating a project
Projects always belong to a client and are created, changed and deleted directly in the client file. Before deletion it is checked whether times have already been booked against it.
The project overview lists all projects with client, status and figures. Its scope depends on which clients are accessible to the person in question.
- A project carries a number, name, description, term and owners.
- Completed projects are set to inactive. They disappear from the booking lists and remain in reports.
- Projects can be imported from a file.
- The projects bookable by a person are available to the app through a route of its own.
Project ownership
A responsible person is stored per project. From that arises a permission case of its own: project owners can reach the project reports without holding one of the three administrative roles.
That is the point at which project work separates from personnel administration. Anyone responsible for a project sees its figures, and that is still a long way from seeing personnel files.
The steps here describe a running system. Anyone who does not have one yet sets it up during the trial and keeps everything created along the way.
The budget
A budget can be stored per project, with an amount, currency, billing type and description. The report sets the budget against the effort used.
The budget is a figure for comparison and not a limit. It blocks no booking, triggers no warning when booking and prevents no overrun. The overrun becomes visible in the report, not in the way.
And the report does not calculate costs. It sets effort against budget. Staff costs, purchasing and third-party services do not appear in it.
Report
The times booked against a project can be reported on, drilling down to individual bookings. They exist in two places: in the reporting view and in the project reports.
Anyone wanting to report per client will find the counterparts with the clients: the time report per client and the breakdown across services.
Follow-up questions
- Can I assign tasks within a project?
- No. A project is a booking dimension with a term and a budget, not a container for work items. Tasks exist in MetronHR only in the onboarding and offboarding workflows, and those hang on a person, not on a project.
- Does the budget prevent an overrun?
- No. It is neither checked nor warned about when booking. The overrun becomes visible in the report, where effort and budget sit side by side.
- Does the budget report calculate our costs?
- No, it sets effort against budget. Staff costs, purchasing and third-party services are not included. Anyone needing cost accounting keeps it elsewhere.
- Who may see the project reports?
- The administrative roles and the owners stored per project. Project ownership is a permission case of its own: it opens the project reports and nothing else.
- What happens to a completed project?
- It is set to inactive and disappears from the booking lists. It remains in reports; otherwise past periods would suddenly look different.
Describes the state of the application onSeptember 2026. What changes in the product is in the product updates.
Published by: AMNAU GmbH
Editorial responsibility: Ugur Aydogan, Product development.
Last reviewed: September 2026
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