Budgets & Tracking

Set budgets on your projects to monitor spending and get alerted before costs exceed expectations.

Budget Types

Choose the budget type that matches how you want to track spending:

Budget Type	Tracks	Best For
Total Hours	Total hours worked across the project	Time-capped engagements
Total Fees	Total billable amount (hours × rates)	Fixed-budget projects
Per-Task	Individual budget per task	Phased or scoped work
Per-Person	Individual budget per team member	Resource-capped projects
None	No budget tracking	Open-ended work

For Total Hours budgets, choose whether all tracked hours consume the budget or only hours marked billable. Existing projects continue to count all tracked hours unless Billable hours only is enabled on that project.

Setting a Budget

Open the project and go to the budget section.
Select your budget type.
Enter the budget amount (hours or currency depending on type).
Optionally enable monthly reset to have the budget renew each month.
For a positive monthly hours budget, optionally set Project activity chart to Monthly budget comparison.

Monthly Reset

When enabled, the budget resets at the beginning of each month. This is useful for:

Retainer clients with a set monthly hour allocation
Ongoing support contracts
Monthly resource budgets

Without monthly reset, the budget applies to the entire life of the project.

Monthly budget comparison

Projects use Automatic (current behaviour) by default. Automatic keeps the adaptive activity chart: daily for short ranges, weekly for medium ranges, and monthly for longer ranges.

For Total Hours, Per-Task hours, and Per-Person hours budgets with monthly reset enabled, an administrator or manager with commercial-project editing access can opt an individual project into Monthly budget comparison. The chart compares consumed hours in every month with the project’s current configured monthly budget, includes zero-activity months, and marks the current month as month to date. Previous months are therefore recalculated if the current budget changes.

Fee and internal-cost budgets continue to use Automatic.

Stopping Time Tracking at the Budget

For a Total Hours budget you can tell Keito to refuse time once the budget is used up, so nobody has to trim hours at month end. Open Edit project > Budget and tick Stop time tracking when the budget is used up. The option only appears for Total Hours budgets, it is off by default, and anyone who can edit the project can switch it on or off.

How it works:

With monthly reset on, each calendar month is judged on its own, using the date of the entry. A late entry for last month counts against last month’s hours, never the current month’s. Without monthly reset the whole life of the project is judged together.
If Billable hours only is on, non-billable time neither counts nor is refused.
Any save that would take the project over its hours is refused with a message such as “Adding 2:00 would take Client retainer over its October hours budget (0:30 left).” This covers new entries in the Day and Week views, duplicates, edits that add time, moving time into the project from Entries, Administrator corrections, the public API, Slack and the Keito for Chrome extension. The Entries move preview lists such rows as skipped with Destination project has used up its hours budget.
A timer cannot be started or restarted on a project that has no hours left. A timer that is already running always stops normally, so it can run past the budget by its own length; the next start is then refused.
Shortening an entry, deleting it, moving it to another project, marking it non-billable and stopping a timer are never refused, even when the project is already over its hours.
Imports from Harvest, CSV and connected apps are not affected, because they mirror time that has already happened.

To let the team keep logging, raise the budget, untick the option, or move the extra time to a project without a stop. The project page shows Time tracking stops when this budget is used up while the option is on, and the public API exposes it as stop_tracking_at_budget on projects.

Over-Budget Notifications

Configure an alert threshold to get notified before a project goes over budget:

Default threshold: 80% of budget consumed
Customizable: Set any percentage that works for you
Notification recipients: Active project managers. Fee alerts require permission to view project financials, and internal-cost alerts require permission to view internal costs. If no eligible project manager exists, active workspace owners and administrators receive the alert.

Keito checks the threshold each morning at 8am in the workspace timezone. The first email arrives on the first morning after the project reaches the threshold. While the project stays above the threshold, non-monthly budgets repeat at most once every seven days and monthly budgets repeat at most once per calendar month. If usage drops below the threshold, the alert resets and can fire again after a later crossing.

Including Expenses

For fee-based budgets, you can optionally include expenses in the budget calculation:

Enabled: Both billable hours and billable expenses count toward the budget.
Disabled: Only billable hours are tracked against the budget.

Budget Visibility

Control who can see budget information:

Visible to team — All project members can see budget progress.
Hidden from team — Only managers and administrators can see budget details.

Administrators can also grant an individual manager See hour budgets and budget progress for projects they manage. This grants only aggregate hours-budget information for projects where the person is an active project manager. It shows Budget, Spent, Progress, and Remaining on both the Projects list and project detail. It does not reveal rates, costs, invoices, uninvoiced amounts, fee budgets, budget export links, or task/person budget allocations. Existing non-financial activity export behavior is unchanged.

Administrators can separately grant Members or Managers See hour budgets and team hour progress for projects they are assigned to. This applies only to active employee or contractor assignments on project-hours, task-hours, and person-hours budgets. It includes aggregate task and teammate hours (including historical contributors needed to reconcile the total), but never rates, money, expenses, invoices, approval state, notes, or individual time entries. The older managed-project permission remains limited to projects the Manager actively manages. On the Projects list, the grant adds Budget, Spent, Progress, and Remaining for eligible assigned projects and allows a current-period row to remain visible when only a teammate recorded time. The separate Hours column stays personal for a Member, so teammate activity does not become a per-person time disclosure. Fee budgets, projects without an hours budget, and unassigned projects remain redacted.

Team-wide budget visibility is configured per project. The manager grant is configured from Team > person > Permissions > Project finances.

Monitoring Budget Progress

Track budget consumption from the project detail page:

Budget total — The full budget amount
Spent — How much has been used (hours or fees)
Remaining — What’s left
Percentage used — Visual progress indicator

You can also see budget status across all projects from the Budget Report.