It’s a great benefit for your clients to have access to all the projects you’re working on for them, particularly because:
- the client knows about all currently running projects
- the client sees when and how much you’re going to invoice them
- the client knows how much budget has been spent – this is important especially in fee-based projects, where they can anticipate when the budget will be exhausted, requiring them to pay for extra work
- the client can export timesheets to Excel themselves
How to add a client to Costlocker
Adding a client to Costlocker is as easy as adding any other person – select People in the top bar and then click Add a new person.
The most important thing here is to assign the Manager role to them. Leave the ckeckboxes empty, so that the client will only see the projects you add them to as supervisor. Last but not least, enter a rate of $0 and save. The client will receive an invitation e-mail through which they can complete their Costlocker registration and define their own password.
How to add a client to a project
Start editing a project and in the very first step (Project details) and add the client’s name as Project supervisor. Save the changes, and as soon as the client logs into Costlocker, they will see this project in their running project list.
What the client sees
Simply put, the client can’t see any profit or expenses (except for external expenses).
The only things the client can see, are these:
- Tracked / Estimated hours = the amount of tracked vs. estimated hours
- Remaining budget = how much money is still available for the project budget
- Billed to date = how much of the project has already been billed
- Revenue = total price of the project (i.e. the project budget)
- Expenses = how much needs to be paid for external expenses
- Discount = how much discount you gave the client on the project
- Project time span = the estimated start and end of the project
Caution: clients can edit or remove projects
Giving anyone Manager-level access means they can accidentally edit and delete projects. That’s why we recommend adding only those clients to Costlocker you have been cooperating with for a long time and have since established a relationship based on mutual trust.