You'll notice many financial concepts and terms when you enter our system. To make your adventure with Primetric easier, we have prepared a glossary of terms.
Under some of these terms, there are specific calculations hidden. If these calculations depend on other settings, you'll find links to articles explaining the differences in the definition.
The Up! button will help you navigate through the dictionary. Press 🆙 to go back to the alphabet list and go to definitions with a different letter.
If you looked for a term in the dictionary and didn't find it in the list, let us know!
A🔹B🔹C🔹D🔹E🔹F🔹G🔹H🔹I🔹J🔹K🔹L🔹M🔹N🔹O🔹P🔹R🔹S🔹T🔹U🔹V 🔹W🔹Y🔹Z
A
Actuals (Project progress report) - values that define the current work, costs, profit, and margin on a specific project.
Administrator (role) - one of three access types. A person with this type of access grants permissions to other users in the organization, manages the Primetric subscription, organization, and settings common to all accounts.
Assigned manager - a person responsible for an employee or specific project.
Assignment - a work planned for a specific individual in a project set by the proper manager. Assignments in capacity planning for professional service companies involve the thoughtful and strategic allocation of employees or teams to projects. This process aims to optimize resource utilization, meet client expectations, and ensure the successful completion of projects while considering factors like skills, availability, and workload. Effective assignment management is essential for the overall efficiency and profitability of professional service firms.
Availability - in Custom reports: availability of a person expressed in hours (reduced by national holidays, approved time-offs, assignments with the checkbox "utilization affects billable capacity" checked, and assignments in the Active status).
Available capacity - in Availability report: this parameter answers the question, how many hours can I sell for a client? (from the people I have on the list and in a given time period), It only shows people who are 100 % available in a given period set by a user. The data is based on assignments. To appear in this report, a person must have a minimum level of availability in at least one of the filtered months. You can set this level of minimum availability by adjusting the specified parameter.
B
Billable capacity - the total amount of time that a person is available for work that you will bill your client for. It's expressed in three different ways: FTE, hours, or minutes. It takes into account national holidays, approved time-offs, and assignments with the "utilization affects billable capacity" checkbox checked.
C
Capacity - the total amount of time, expressed in three different ways (FTE, hours or minutes) a person can spend working in a given period. It is deducted by time off and public holidays.
Capacity - in Availability report - the maximum amount of work that can be completed in a given period of time. It’s calculated by multiplying the number of working hours a day by the number of working days in a selected period of time.
Contract capacity - the total amount of time, a person can work in a given period. It is NOT decreased by any scheduled assignments, time offs, and public holidays.
Contract Utilization - a billable work tracked by a person, divided by the person's contract capacity.
Contractor - a person with an hourly salary based on the number of logged hours.
Cost restricted - financial permission granted or revoked by the administrator for a manager. Its purpose is to restrict the visibility of some employees' and contractors' financial data.
Custom attributes - fields that can be configured in various parts of the application to contain organization-specific information defined by the administrator.
Custom report - an organizational report based on the manager's selected values and grouping criteria.
A custom report is an individualized report that allows you to group data, select specific values, generate a chart, and export data to Excel.
D
Data fields - defined areas for the entire organization across different categories.
E
Employee (role) - access type enabling the user access to the panel that allows tracking working time, guarantees access to the calendar, request time offs, and add skills.
Employee (contract type) - a person with a fixed monthly salary regardless of the number of logged hours. The Employee contract type includes both employees and B2B contractors.
F
Finance manager - a manager for an employee or contractor allowed to see their cost. Adding HR permissions to Finance Manager will allow him to edit a person's contract. The permission can be added in the Profile > Managers section.
Fixed price income - a revenue generated within a specified timeframe in the Fixed Price model.
Fixed price project - a billing model of a project in which the revenue does not depend on the time worked by people in the project. A billing is based on a fixed amount of money at a specified time period.
H
Hard Bookings / Hard allocations - confirmed reservations that are certain to take place.
Hour cost - agreed amount per hour for a person's work on the project set for contractors.
Hour rate - the price client pays for a person's working hours in a Time & Material projects set in various places.
I
Identity provider - an external platform used to log in to Primetric.
Integration - the connection created between an external software and Primetric.
M
Manager (role) - one of three access types. A person with this access type can track work time and manage people, projects, calendars, and people's leaves of absence. It includes one of the most important features: the ability to create business reports in real-time.
Margin - it represents the percentage ratio of profit to revenue.
Milestone - defined intervals in the project that determine billing periods. The billing is done up to the day of a specific milestone. By default, these periods are set at the end of each month till the end date of the project.
Milestone settlement - billing for a defined time period in the project, along with the assignments within its scope.
N
Non-billable project - a type of project in which people track time for activities that are not directly billable to the client.
Non-billable utilization - the amount of time an employee is committed to work on non-billable or internal projects.
Not-settled - refers to items that have been tracked but not yet confirmed, such as overheads, work, budget, etc. Their value may differ from the Scheduled or Settled values.
O
Organization Overhead - general costs and revenues, either fixed or one-time, generated by a specific category within a given time. Managers with organizational and financial access define them.
Overbooking - is when an employee has been assigned more working time than his or her capacity.
Overhead - additional costs of running a business. In Primetric, overheads are divided into organizational and project overheads and cost and revenue overheads (also check: Organization Overhead and Project Overhead).
P
Person - a member of an organization with or without access to the platform.
Phase - a defined period of work in the project with a given name, and duration.
Platform access - a function that allows that person to access designated application features based on their assigned roles directly.
Profit - the value defined as a result of revenue minus the cost.
Project - the planned scope of work resulting from the agreement with the client. It exists in various billing models.
Project billing model - a defined way of billing in a given project includes the following models: Time and Material, Fixed Price, and Non-billable.
Project budget - the balance of scheduled, not settled, and settled costs and revenues generated in a specific project.
Project overhead - additional costs required to complete a project, not involving direct work on an operation. Project overhead typically includes subscriptions, software licenses, business trips, and workshops.
R
Retainer Projects - maintenance or development projects that generate fixed monthly income. In Primetric their billing model needs to be defined as Time and Materials or Fixed Price.
Role - 1. the function that a particular person covers in the project. 2. an access type in Primetric. There are 3 of them: Administrator, Manager, and Employee. Learn more: Lesson 3 - Roles and accesses in the Primetric.
S
Scheduled - it refers to items that are planned, such as utilization, overheads, margin, work, budget, etc. Their value may differ from the Not settled or Settled values.
Scheduled work - the cumulative amount of time, expressed in hours, minutes or FTE that has been allocated or designated for specific activities across different statuses, including Active, Reserved, and Draft. It encompasses all planned and pre-allocated hours across various stages of work or projects, capturing the total time set aside for each status.
Scheduled utilization - a work planned for an employee that can be billed to a client, divided by the employee's capacity.
Settled - it refers to items that have been confirmed, such as overheads, work, budget, milestones, etc. Their value may differ from the Scheduled or Not Settled values.
Settled assignment - confirmed scope of work that is a part of the milestone.
Skill hours - hypothetical number of hours worked by the employee. The number of real hours is multiplied by the skill rate.
Skill Rate - is a simple system developed by Primetric to calculate the income per person in fixed-price projects. By determining the employee's Skill Rate on a scale of 1 to 10, we determine the value of their work in the fixed-price project.
Soft Bookings / Soft allocations - reservations or drafts that are still uncertain or not yet confirmed.
T
Time & Material Projects - a billing model of a project in which the revenue does depend on the total amount of time worked by people in the project. A billing is based on worked hours and hour rates at a specified time period.
Time off - leaves requested by an employee with the employee role, which can have different statuses. Time offs are expressed in hours, minutes, days count, or FTE.
Time off manager - a manager responsible for approving vacation requests for a particular employee. Multiple time off managers can be assigned to one employee, but each of them must approve the request for it to change status. If no time off manager is assigned to an employee, their requests are automatically approved.
Timesheet - a place where both the employee and the respective manager can record, edit, or delete the time worked in a specific assignment.
Tracked billable hours - the specific amount of billable time logged, expressed in hours. It denotes the total hours billed to the client.
Tracked non-billable hours - the distinct duration of non-billable time logged, expressed in hours. It indicates the total hours spent on projects that are not billable to clients or customers.
Time tracking - a process of logging the activities of employees, as well as their allocations and the costs of their work in Primetric or in external software.
Tracked time - the logged time of a person's work, encompassing billable and non-billable projects, expressed in minutes, hours, and Full-Time Equivalent (FTE).
U
Unutilized time costs - operational costs that include all costs of non-billable projects, as well as the unutilized time of people. Learn more: Include organization overheads and unutilized time costs in the Project Finance Report.
Utilization - the percentage of billable work divided by the person's capacity. Learn more: Use Employees' Working Time Wisely. The Utilization Report Guide.
W
Withdraw - a rollback of a settled assignment or milestone.
Workload - the amount of work a person has to complete in a given time period.
Worklog - a detailed record of a single time entry.