Lauri Eurén

Matti Parviainen

Mikko Karjalainen

Set up and structure clients, projects, project phases, and project types.

Clients & Projects

A Client in Operating is a customer company you do billable work for — the entity that groups a customer's projects, invoices, and revenue together.

What is a client?

How to create a new client in Operating, with the option to set an owner, mark it internal, and add contacts and tags afterward.

How to add a client?

A Project is Operating's central container for a piece of work — holding the team, time, budgets, and expenses for one engagement.

What is a project?

How to create a new project in Operating, setting the client, billing type, status, and other key fields.

How to create a project

Projects in Operating

Use internal and non-billable work to distinguish between client projects which bring in money and internal work.

Internal and non-billable work in Operating

Estimated start and end dates are an early, approximate marker for when a Project's work is expected to begin and finish. They exist for the initial planning phase — before Positions and Allocations have been set up — and are replaced by real planning data as the Project takes shape.

What are estimated start and end dates?

Project phases are named stages within a project — like Design, Implementation, and Launch — that let you organize the team and time by stage without affecting budgets or rates.

What are project phases?

Project phases let you split a Project into stages — like Design, Implementation, and Launch — and assign Positions to each. This shows you how to create and manage them.

How do I set up project phases?

Ownership in Operating is split across a few roles: a Project has a project owner, an optional secondary owner, and a separate invoice owner, while a Client has a client owner. This article explains what each one is — and because ownership controls access, approval routing, and reporting, who holds these roles matters beyond the label.

What are a project owner, secondary owner, invoice owner, and client owner?

Search our documentation to find articles about how to set up & use Operating.app

Feedback

Roadmap

Changelog

Developer & API Documentation

Set up your account and learn the basics — trial walkthroughs, first-time setup, rollout, and quick starts for each role.

Get started

Guided first sessions matched to each trial signup path — pick the one you started with.

Trial / explore paths

A step-by-step guide to getting started when you log in to Operating for the first time with a blank account.

When you first sign up for Operating, your account is empty. This guide walks you through the recommended steps to set up your organization, add your first data, and start planning.

Getting started with an empty trial account

Explore your trial account and learn how Operating can help you with resource planning.

Your trial account comes pre-loaded with sample data so you can explore the platform right away. This guide walks you through the key areas. If you'd like a trial account, sign up for a free trial on our website.

Getting started with resource planning

Explore your trial account and learn how Operating connects resource planning with time tracking, so you can plan work on the timeline and compare it against actual hours logged by your team.

Your trial account comes pre-loaded with sample data so you can explore the platform right away. This guide walks you through the key areas.

Getting started with resource planning and timesheets

Explore your trial account and learn how Operating connects resource planning, time tracking, and invoicing to manage the full professional services workflow from staffing through to billing.

Your trial account comes pre-loaded with sample data so you can explore the platform right away. This guide walks you through the key areas.

Getting started with resource planning, timesheets, and invoicing

The end-to-end checklist for setting Operating up from scratch.

Step-by-step setup (start here)

Step-by-step Operating setup guide (start here)

Short orientation guides tailored to what each role does day to day.

Quick start per role

Quick user guide

A guide to finding your schedule, managing your profile, and tracking your time.

Getting started with Operating as a consultant

Plan and run a smooth rollout to your whole team.

Rollout to your organization

This is a great first article to skim through as an admin.

How to roll out Operating to your organization

Configure Operating for your organization — foundations, people and access, commercial setup, SSO, connecting your stack, and data import.

Set up & administer

The building blocks you configure once — sites, groups, tags, roles, seniority, skills, statuses, and holiday calendars.

Foundations

Your Organization is your entire Operating account; a Company is the legal entity within it that issues invoices. The distinction is mostly invisible for single-entity businesses — it matters most when you run multiple legal entities in the same account.

What's the difference between an Organization and a Company?

Introduction to the organizational structure

Sites, Groups, Tags

Roles and seniority levels define how competence is structured in Operating — a Role is the broad discipline a person works in, and a seniority level refines it. Together they drive billing and cost rates, power staffing suggestions, and enable planning and forecasting by competence.

Roles and seniority levels

Skills

Site-based public holidays that are non-working days for everyone

Holiday calendars (public holidays)

In depth dive into how project and allocation statuses work in Operating

Statuses in Operating

Add people, control who can log in and what they see, and set working hours, approvals, and reporting lines.

People & access

What’s the difference between a User and a Person in Operating?

Operating helps you plan the work for both in-house employees and externals.

What's the difference between in-house and external team members?

Two things decide whether a Person can track time on a project: their time-tracking permissions and their project membership — both need to allow it.

Who can track time on a project?

How to add a new Person

How to give team members access to Operating

How to set individual and part-time working hours

How to set up approval flows

All about permissions and how you may configure them for different users in your company

Permission sets in Operating

Reporting structure (reports to)

Set the rates, costs, and expense rules that drive your financials.

Commercial setup

In this section, you’ll set up the rates and costs that power your consulting firm’s financial insights in Operating.

Introduction to Financials

In Settings > Financials > Rates you can create new Rate cards.

Rate cards

How to set up the cost rate layers in Operating — from organization-wide defaults through site-based cost cards to per-person and per-project overrides.

How to set up cost rates

How to set up expense categories and vendors

Currencies

Set up single sign-on and automatic user provisioning.

SSO & provisioning

Single sign-on (SSO) lets your team log in to Operating with your identity provider. This explains how to turn it on and how Operating creates and matches Users when people first sign in.

How does single sign-on (SSO) work in Operating?

Overview of SSO using Microsoft Entra and setup instructions.

How to set up SSO with Entra ID

How to set up SSO with Google Workspace

Bring data in, export it out, migrate from another tool, and set date formats.

Data import & date formats

How does date formatting work in Operating?

A collection of instructions. Consider this a friendly “there’s a lot that can be wrong with your file, let’s investigate” response from the Operating customer support team.

How to import data from a CSV file

How to export data from Operating

Step by step instructions for how to test, configure and start using Operating Hours

How to migrate from your old time-tracking tool

Archive what's no longer active and merge duplicate clients, projects, and people.

Archiving & merging

How does archiving work in Operating?

How to archive and unarchive projects

Merging entities in Operating helps you clean up duplicates, consolidate data across systems, or handle project continuations. This guide walks you through how to merge entities and what to expect during the process.

How to merge clients, projects, and people

Sometimes after an import you might need to do this

How to merge Time Off projects 

What each feature is and how to use it day to day — planning, time tracking, projects, financials, invoicing, views, and reports.

Features & how-tos

Concepts overview

Plan who works on what and when — positions, allocations, capacity, and staffing.

Resource planning

Positions and Allocations are the two layers Operating uses to plan work on a project — a Position defines who holds a role, and Allocations define when and how much they're planned to work.

What are Positions and Allocations?

Allocation probability lets you discount tentative work by how likely it is to happen — so capacity plans and revenue forecasts reflect the real shape of your pipeline, not just a best case.

What is allocation probability?

Time off in Operating is how leave — holidays, vacation, sick days, and other absence — is planned for your people. It removes a person's availability so that capacity, cost, and revenue all reflect when someone isn't working.

What is time off?

Capacity shows how much of a Person's working time is booked versus available — built from their working hours, adjusted for time off, holidays, and employment dates.

What is capacity and how is it calculated?

A worked example of how Operating reads capacity when time off and project work overlap — and how to fix an overbooked week.

Capacity in action: reading time off and overbooking

How to find available people for a project

Starting point: A brand new project appears. If you're using a CRM integration, the project may already exist as a tentative project synced from a deal.

How to staff a project from scratch

In Operating, work on a Project is organized into two layers: Positions and Allocations. A Position is a role a Person holds on a Project. An Allocation is a block of planned time assigned to that Position for a specific date range. One Position can have many Allocations.

How to manage allocations

How to manage Positions after they've been created — changing who fills them, editing their requirements, and moving them between projects.

How to move, reassign, or remove a position

The Timeline is an overview of who’s working on what and when.

How to add and manage allocations in the People Timeline

Resource planning in Operating happens in the timeline view.

Timeline layout and settings

Record, submit, and approve time — plus tasks, timesheets, and the concepts behind them.

Time tracking

Time tracking is how people in Operating record completed work — the time entries they log become the actuals that drive billing, profitability, and utilization reporting.

What is time tracking?

See our introductory video on time tracking to get going quickly.

Time tracking: quick introduction for users

Understanding Tasks and Task lists

Submitting (locking) a timesheet finalizes a Person's hours up to a chosen date, locks those days from editing, and signals that they're ready to be reviewed, approved, and billed.

What does submitting (locking) a timesheet do?

Track balance of tracked time, going over or under the contract hours

Time balance (flex)

Start tracking time where you already plan time. If you're interested in the timesheet functionality, drop us a message to hello@operating.app and we can give you trial access.

How to start tracking time in Operating

In Operating you can submit timesheets (or lock timesheets) in the Hours tab, in the timesheet view

How to submit (lock) a timesheet

How to unlock a submitted timesheet

How to approve submitted hours

How to create tasks and task lists

How to track time against a project phase

Sometimes the employee can't create or modify their own time entries and an admin needs to step in

How to edit timesheets on behalf of someone else

How to view, edit, and export time entry data

How to require notes and tasks on time entries

How to create time entries automatically on public holidays

Rounding time entries

There are two views for entering time in Operating: the timesheet view and the list view.

Timesheet view and time entries list view

Here's how you can use Sites to specify where the work was done

Location information for time tracking

Budgets, rates, billing types, expenses, and profitability — what they are and how to set them up.

Financials

A Budget in Operating is the agreed monetary value of an engagement — the financial target a project is planned and measured against.

What is a budget?

What are the billing types?

How Operating calculates project profitability — the formulas behind gross profit and margin, what to watch by billing type, and how time off and the burnup chart fit in.

Budgeting and profitability: a worked example

How Operating resolves the billing rate for each Position — checking from the most specific source down to a global fallback, in a fixed order.

How does Operating decide which rate to use?

How Operating resolves the internal cost rate for each Person on a Position — checking from the most specific source down to a site-based default, in a fixed order.

How does Operating decide the cost rate?

Understanding expenses in Operating

How to set up a time-and-materials (per-hour) project

There are things to pay attention to when planning fixed-price projects.

How to set up a fixed-price project

How to add expenses and expense budgets

Create and send invoices from tracked work and expenses.

Invoicing

Invoicing in Operating is how you assemble and finalize what to bill a client — pulling together time entries and expenses into a billing document that captures revenue and feeds your profitability reporting.

What is invoicing?

Creating an invoice from tracked time entries and expenses, reviewing and adjusting it, and sending it to your client.

How to create and send an invoice

Find your way around Operating — the sidebar, detail pages, views, and filtering.

Navigation & views

The left-hand sidebar and how to make most of it

Sidebar navigation

The Person detail page

How to create, pin, share, and edit views

View options

Filtering means narrowing down a set of results – projects, positions, or people