If you've received an invoice from a freelancer or an individual who doesn't have access to Allfred, and you need to track their time because you're selling their work as your internal service, Allfred has a solution for this. You can log their time as a work expense, ensuring it aligns with your internal budgeting and reporting.
How to create a work expense?
1) Click on the "+New" button in the upper right corner and choose the "Expense" option
or
In the project detail, click on the amount of spent budget -> then in the modal click on "+Add new expense"
2) In the Expense items split, choose one of the Our Work budget items to assign the costs to.
3) Click on the checkbox "Track hours" to open the option for tracking hours.
4) Specify the task, the number of hours, the position, and the date for time tracking. Allfred uses the hourly rate of the selected position to deduct the corresponding amount from the project's available budget.
Good to know
Tracking hours this way simulates that the work was done by an internal team member, even though it was actually outsourced. The project's progress bar moves based on hours × internal rate, so the client sees the value as if the agency tracked it in-house. However, in profitability reports and statistics, Allfred still uses the actual expense amount, not the simulated hourly value.
Allfred also creates a Time entry for the tracked hours, recorded under a user called "work expense". This entry appears both in the project's Time reports and in the global Time Reports section, so it's included in your overall hours overview even though no real person logged it there directly.
Work expense without tracking hours
If you prefer not to track hours when assigning an expense to a work budget item, Allfred will only deduct the total expense amount from the project's available budget, and the number of available hours to spend will remain unchanged. In this case, the progress bar moves directly by the entered amount, with no simulated hours involved.
Where to find Work expenses in the project?
To get an overview of assigned costs for work budget items at the project level, click on the amount of the spent budget in the project detail. This will open a modal window displaying detailed information about the expense, reported date, position, tracked hours, and the total amount.
