Every hour tracked in WiseData Time needs a project, and almost every project belongs to a customer. These two records are what turn a pile of hours into an answer: without them you have a stopwatch; with them you have the contract's math.
Customers
Under Customers › New customer. Only the Name is required — you can create Soap Factory in five seconds and come back later. The other fields:
Nationality — domestic or foreign. It changes the document field: national ID or company number in the first case, passport, TIN or VAT in the second.
Document — the customer's tax or registration number.
Phone and Email — day-to-day contact.
Colour — helps you spot the customer at a glance in lists.
Notes — what the team needs to remember before talking to that client.
Active — uncheck it when the contract ends. The customer leaves your daily path without their history disappearing from reports.
Opening a customer shows their details and the list of their projects, each with its status. It's the screen to review, before a renewal, everything still open with that company.
Projects
Under Projects › New project. The name and the customer answer "whose work is this"; the rest answers "how much should it bring in".
Customer — leave it blank to create an internal project (team meetings, new business, training). It still counts hours and shows up on its own line in reports instead of disappearing.
Code — the identifier you already use in the proposal or in accounting, if any.
Status — Active, Paused, Completed or Archived. It's the filter that keeps the tracking list short.
Billable — sets how hours on that project are born. Each hour can still be changed individually.
Tags — to cross-cut by type of work later in reports.
Start and End — used to calculate revenue on retainer contracts.
Billing model and contract amount
This is the field most people skip and later miss. It tells the system how that project makes money, and it's what the Profitability screen compares against time spent:
Fixed fee — the Contract amount is the agreed total. Soap Factory's Rebranding at 50,000 goes here.
Hourly — revenue comes from billable hours times the hourly rate. There's no contract amount to fill in.
Retainer — the field becomes Monthly amount and applies per month. It's the recurring fee, and that's why the start and end dates matter.
Not defined — the project works normally, but Profitability will say it can't calculate its revenue. That's honest information, not an error.
Seeing and editing the contract amount requires the rates permission — whoever doesn't have it simply doesn't see the field.
Budgeted hours: the project's budget
Budgeted hours is the time budget. If Rebranding was quoted at 200 hours, write 200. From then on the system can do two things that are impossible without that number:
Show budget consumption in Profitability, with a projection of when it will overrun at the current pace.
Send an email alert to whoever administers the workspace when the project crosses the configured percentages.
For recurring contracts there's the Budgeted hours reset every month option: 40 hours per month, not 40 hours until the end of the contract.
What happens when you delete
Deleting a customer or a project is permanent and takes the history attached to it. When you only want it out of the way, use Active (on the customer) or the Archived status (on the project): the past stays in the reports and your daily list stays clean.
Where to go next
Tasks and tags — the layer that gives your report detail.
Hourly rate — how to set the price per customer and per project.
Profitability and budget — where these fields turn into answers.
Timer and manual entry — tracking hours on the projects you created.
In short: create the customer with a name and refine later; on the project, fill in billing model, contract amount and budgeted hours — those three fields are what let the system say whether the contract was worth it and warn you before the budget overruns. To get things out of the way without losing history, deactivate or archive instead of deleting.