Counting hours without a price shows effort; counting hours with a price shows business. This is the screen that turns one into the other — and it was built for the real case, where the hourly price isn't a single number: the big client pays more, the partner costs more than the junior, and one specific project was closed at a discount.
The hourly rate is part of the Pro plan.
The order the system looks in
For each tracked hour, WiseData Time looks for the rate in this sequence and stops at the first one it finds:
Project — the rate for that specific project.
Customer — the rate agreed with that customer.
Person — the rate of whoever tracked the hour.
Workspace default — the value that applies to everything else.
In practice: if Soap Factory's Rebranding has its own rate of 250, every hour there is worth 250, no matter who tracked it. If the project has no rate but the customer does, the customer's applies. And so on, down to the house default.
Note that the person sits between the customer and the default: a rate agreed with the client beats the individual rate. That's what makes commercial sense — what was agreed with whoever pays takes precedence over the internal table.
Where each one is set
Workspace default — under Workspace, in the Default rate block. Start here: a single number already makes the whole product work.
Project — in the rate column of the Projects list.
Customer — in the rate column of the Customers list.
Person — in the Rate/hour column of the Team list.
In any of them, the same panel opens and shows what currently applies there: Set here, Inherited from a level above, or No rate set. Leaving the field blank goes back to inheriting — the panel tells you how much and from where, before you save.
Only those with the rates permission see these columns. For everyone else they simply don't exist: it's not an empty field, it's total absence — a price agreed with a client is business information, not team information.
The amount is frozen at the moment of tracking
When the hour is recorded, it stores the value it had at that moment. Raising the rate in September does not change August's hours.
That's what protects your history: without the freeze, a rate increase would rewrite the value of everything already worked, and the report you delivered to the client in June would start showing a different number. It's also why it's worth setting the rate before the team starts tracking — an hour logged with no rate is born with no amount, and stays that way until you recalculate.
When the rate was entered wrong
For that case there's Recalculate amounts, under Workspace. You give the period (from/to) and the hours in that range take on the current rates.
Three things matter here:
It's a deliberate operation, with confirmation. If the period was already invoiced, the amounts will stop matching the invoice you sent — the screen says so beforehand.
Entries whose amount was set by hand are not changed. A recalculation that wipes out manual adjustments is one nobody uses twice.
Already approved periods are left out. Approving freezes the amount, and the result tells you how many entries were skipped for that reason.
Where the amount shows up
With the rate set, the amount appears in the day's entry list, in the timesheet totals, in the amount column of Reports and as revenue in Profitability. In reports, a notice shows how many entries ended up without a rate and therefore don't count towards the amount — that's the number explaining a total lower than you expected.
Where to go next
Team cost and margin — the other side of the equation.
Profitability and budget — the amount turning into an answer.
Workspace settings — the currency, which locks once the first amount exists.
Plans and billing — the plan that includes the hourly rate.
In short: the rate is looked up on project, customer, person and workspace default, in that order; set the default first and refine later; the amount is frozen at the moment of tracking, and fixing a wrong rate is an explicit per-period recalculation that preserves manual adjustments and doesn't touch approved periods.