Fee budgets by phase
Budgeted hours and budgeted fee per phase, per project — the structure claims, timesheets and reporting all hang off.
The fee, the hours and the WIP — finally the same number.
Most firms hold the fee in a spreadsheet, the hours in a timesheet tool and the invoices in accounts — three systems, three versions of the truth, reconciled at month end. Engis holds them as one record: fee budgets by phase, weekly timesheets burning against them as they are logged, and work-in-progress computed continuously from the gap between the two.
Fee management that lives inside the project
Every Engis project carries fee budgets by phase — budgeted hours and budgeted fee against the phases an Australian engineering job actually runs: planning, functional layout, detailed design for roads and sewer, estate major works, tender, construction phase services, Statement of Compliance. Not a generic task list with money bolted on; the same phase structure the delivery programme runs on.
Because the budgets, the timesheets and the claims live on one record, the questions that normally take a reconciliation take a glance: how much of this phase’s fee is burnt, what is unbilled across the firm, which projects are consuming budget faster than they are earning it.
Month-end reconciliation is where fee problems go to hide.
When the fee lives apart from the hours, the commercial position of a job is only ever computed after the fact. A phase quietly overruns for three weeks before the spreadsheet catches up. Unbilled work accumulates between claim cycles because nobody owns the number in real time. None of it is visible at the moment it could still be managed.
- Fee burn computed at month end, discovered too late to act on
- Timesheet hours divorced from the phase budgets they consume
- WIP as a quarterly surprise instead of a daily number
- Charge-rate errors found at invoicing, not at entry
- Utilisation and profitability reported from different sources
- The one person who maintains the spreadsheet becomes the system
How it works in Engis
Weekly timesheet grid
A weekly grid built for how engineers actually book time — by project and phase, distinguishing billable work from overhead, prospect work and leave.
Submission and approval
Weeks are submitted and approved through a proper workflow, and an approved week locks — enforced at the database, not by convention — so the record billing relies on cannot drift after the fact.
Rates managed centrally
Charge and cost rates are managed per person and stamped onto entries server-side at the moment of booking — never supplied by the client device, never edited into history.
Continuous WIP
Work-in-progress is computed from unbilled billable time at charge rates, continuously. The firm-wide position and the projects carrying the most WIP relative to their fee are a dashboard, not a quarter-end project.
Live fee burn
Logged hours burn against phase budgets as they land, so a phase running ahead of its fee is visible during the phase — while there is still something to do about it.
GST-aware invoicing
Claims raised from the record flow through an approval workflow to a GST-aware invoice, generated as a client-ready PDF.
Xero integration
An available per-firm integration pushes approved claims to Xero and syncs invoice and payment status back automatically — enabled per firm on request.
Reporting on the same record
Financial, utilisation, WIP, profitability, phase-hours and budget-versus-actual reporting — plus a 12-month cashflow forecast — built from the records the work runs on, not exported into a second system.
What each seat gets
Directors and principals
The firm-wide fee, WIP and unbilled position live, with profitability and utilisation reported from the same source of truth.
Project managers
Phase burn beside the programme — the commercial state of the job in the same workspace as the delivery state.
Engineers
A weekly grid that takes minutes, in the same system as the projects — not another login to resent.
Accounts
Approved, locked timesheet weeks and claims that reconcile to Xero — with rate integrity enforced upstream, at entry.
Against the usual stack
Timesheet tools
They capture hours but know nothing about fee phases, permits or claims. The hours land in a silo and the commercial meaning is reconstructed elsewhere. In Engis the hours are the fee burn.
Practice management suites
Strong on time-and-bill, blind to delivery. Engis carries the same commercial layer inside the system that also runs phases, approvals, documents and spatial context — one record, not two systems reconciled.
The spreadsheet
The spreadsheet version of fee control depends entirely on the person maintaining it, and it is always one meeting out of date. Structure beats heroics.
Frequently asked questions
How does Engis calculate WIP?
WIP is unbilled billable time valued at charge rates, computed continuously from approved timesheet records. The dashboard shows the firm-wide position and the projects carrying the most WIP relative to their fee, and claims carry payment due dates so overdue amounts surface.
Can timesheets be edited after approval?
No — an approved week locks, and the lock is enforced at the database level. Corrections happen through the approval workflow, not by quietly editing history, which is exactly what makes the WIP and billing numbers trustworthy.
Who sets charge rates?
Managers set per-person charge rates, with sensible guardrails on who can change whose. Rates are stamped onto entries server-side when time is booked, so a later rate change never silently rewrites past WIP.
Does it integrate with Xero?
Yes — a Xero integration is available per firm that pushes approved claims to Xero as invoices and syncs invoice and payment status back automatically. It is connected and enabled per firm on request.
Can Engis set up fee budgets from our fee proposal?
Yes. Engis AI reads a fee proposal PDF and extracts the project, client and per-phase fee and hours breakdown to pre-fill project setup — you review and confirm before anything is created.
Make the fee a live number.
Request a sandbox preview on synthetic data, book a 20-minute demo — or run the ROI calculator on your own figures first.
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