Track Time and Expenses with the Project App

The Project app — sometimes called Time & Expense, or T&E — is where you enter your own time, get it approved, review trips and receipts, run master projects and their teams, and bill customers. It’s one docked workspace, not a set of floating windows: a navigation rail down the left opens each screen as a pane in the centre, and opening a record — a timesheet for approval, a trip, a master project, an invoice — docks its detail in a drawer on the right without losing the list you were working from.

One docked workspace — the rail opens a screen in the centre in place, and a record’s detail opens in a drawer on the right without hiding the list you were working from.

The Workspace Layout

The rail is grouped into three sections:

• My work — Home, Time, Approvals, Trips.
• Manage — Setup, People, Trip Assignment.
• Billing — Invoices, Accounts, Voids.

A count badge appears on a rail item when there’s something waiting on it — sheets you haven’t submitted, sheets awaiting your approval, unassigned trips, past-due invoices — and clears once there’s nothing left. Every pane keeps its place when you switch away and back, remembering your last filter and week, and deep links work the same way they do everywhere else in PlaidCloud: the URL follows whichever pane or drawer is in front, so a link to a specific timesheet or invoice opens straight to it. Any pane listing rows can export what’s currently visible as a CSV.

Two things make the workspace fit your window:

• Drag the drawer wider. Grab the thin grip on the drawer’s left edge and drag; the drawer keeps the list beside it readable, never passes the window edge, and scrolls its own body so its buttons stay reachable. PlaidCloud remembers the width you choose for each kind of drawer and regrows it if you enlarge the window.
• The More menu. When a pane’s toolbar is too narrow for all its buttons, the ones that don’t fit move into a More menu at the end of the toolbar. Filters and search fields stay in place.

Money shows with thousands separators and its currency (a symbol such as €, £, or ¥ where there is one, otherwise the currency code), and dates show as the calendar day you picked, the same in every time zone.

Who Can See What

What the rail shows you depends on your role, and a destination you don’t have permission for is left off the rail entirely rather than shown and disabled:

• Anyone with access to the app sees Home, enters and submits their own time on Time, sees their own trips and receipts on Trips, and sees themselves — and, where visible, their own approvers and assistants — on People.
• Approvals and Trip Assignment only appear for members set up to approve time or manage trip billing.
• Billing — Invoices, Accounts, and Voids — only appears for members with billing permissions on the project.
• Rate, dollar amounts, PO value, and billing rates are visible only to members with billing permissions; everyone else sees hours and status with no money attached.

An administrator grants these through Security Groups.

Home

Home is a set of cards, each shown only if it applies to you:

• Hours This Week, compared with last week.
• Sheets Not Submitted — click through to Time, filtered to your drafts.
• Returned to You — sheets an approver sent back for changes — click through to Time, filtered to returned.
• Awaiting Your Approval — click through to Approvals.
• Unassigned Trips — click through to Trip Assignment (finance).
• Ready to Bill — approved time not yet on an invoice, with a count and total — click through to Invoices (finance).
• Open Invoices and Past-Due Invoices, each with a count and total — click through to Invoices, pre-filtered (finance).

While you’re acting as someone else (see People below), Home shows only what’s relevant to that member — your own personal cards are hidden until you switch back.

Time

Time is a weekly grid, one row per project, work location, and billable flag, with a column for each day, Sunday through Saturday, and a Total column and footer row. Choosing a project shows only the work locations set up for it, with the projects you’ve used most recently listed first and your last work location and billable flag filled in as the default. Move week with Previous Week, This Week, and Next Week; add a row with Add Row, or Copy Last Week to bring over last week’s rows in one step — any project you’re no longer on is skipped and called out. Add a note to any entry in its Notes field. Each row saves as you edit it, with its own status and a Retry if a save fails, and a deleted row can be undone.

Each sheet carries a status chip — Draft, Submitted, Approved, or Returned — and a separate billing badge, Partly billed or Billed, that can appear at any status once time has been invoiced. A returned sheet shows the approver’s note and reopens as a draft for you to fix; an approved sheet shows a banner explaining it’s locked and disables every control, except right after approval or when you’ve opened it from an emailed link, when it also offers Reopen — see Approvals below. An older sheet for a week that already has a newer one shows read-only with a note and a Show Newest link. A sheet flags — without blocking the save — a long day, a weekend entry, or a project you’re over your allotted hours on; going over 24 hours on any one day is a hard limit and is refused outright. Add a note in the Memo field, then Submit when the week is ready for review; submitting mails your approvers. Delete Sheet removes a draft entirely, with a confirmation first. A side panel labeled My Sheets lists your sheets, filterable to All / Draft / Submitted / Approved / Returned, remembers the week and filter you last used, and every sheet keeps a timeline of who submitted, returned, approved, or reopened it, and when.

With billing permissions, the grid also shows Rate, Amount, and Billed per row; without them, only hours and status appear.

Approvals

Approvals lists every submitted sheet waiting on you, oldest first, with a Returned filter for what you’ve already sent back. Select several and choose Approve Selected (it shows the count) to approve them together in one all-or-nothing action, or select one to open it in the drawer: the member, the week, the memo, every entry with its daily hours and total, any warnings (a long day, a weekend entry, a project over its allotted hours), the member’s hours and billable percentage for this week and last, and a timeline of who submitted, returned, approved, or reopened the sheet and when. Approve moves it off the queue and the pane selects the next sheet for you. Return for Changes opens a note strip asking what needs to change; type the note (required) and choose Send Back to mail the member and return the sheet to draft. Cancel closes the strip without sending. You can never approve your own sheet, even if a self-approver relationship exists on the account — that’s enforced on every approval path, not just the obvious one. With billing permissions, the drawer also shows rate and amount per entry.

Right after you approve a sheet, or whenever you open an already-approved sheet from its emailed link, Reopen is available to turn it back into a draft — add an optional note and choose Reopen, and the member is mailed. Outside those two moments there’s no standing list of approved sheets to reopen from, so a correction to an older approval starts from that sheet’s email link.

Trips and Trip Assignment

Trips shows your own trips, sourced from Ramp, read-only — pick what to list from the Show select — All, Not Submitted, Not Approved, Approved, or Quick (your ten most recent). Open a trip to see its expenses and receipts in the drawer, preview a receipt, or download Receipts PDF — a single PDF merging every receipt on that trip. With billing permissions the list also shows each trip’s billable total.

Trip Assignment is where finance assigns trips to projects, across three tabs — My Trips, My Team, All Unassigned — with Assign to Project…, Mark Billable, and Mark Non-Billable available on a selection.

Setup

Setup is where master projects, their sub-projects, billing roles, team, and work locations live; a guided checklist walks a new master project through its first team and work locations. The list opens to your master projects — filter Open / Closed / All, tick Only mine to see just your own master projects, or search — with New Master Project to create one. Customers appear by name. Opening a master shows its header (customer, PO number, and, with billing permissions, PO value with a PO burn bar showing billable time booked against it) with Edit and Archive, over tabs:

• Projects — the master’s sub-projects; each carries its own time/expense-enabled flags, dates, status, and project manager. Use a row’s pencil icon to edit a project and its minus icon to delete it — the Project form opens in delete mode and asks you to confirm.
• Team — who’s assigned to a project, their role, admin/inactive flags, time and expense limits, and hours used against those limits; billing permissions add rate, amount, and billable. Add Members adds several people to a project in one step — if any can’t be added, none are.
• Roles — the billing roles available on the master, each with its own billable rate; edit or delete a role from its row icons.
• Work Locations — the master’s locations (city, state, country), used by the Time grid’s project → location cascade.
• Invoices — every invoice against this master (billing permissions only).

People

People lists every member on the project, with an Approvers column (if you can see approver relationships) and an Assistants column (if you can see assistant relationships) — you always see your own row. Edit Approvers opens a drawer to add or remove who approves a selected member’s time; My Assistants lets you name the members who can act as your assistant.

If someone has named you their assistant, an Acting as banner lets you switch into their Time and Trips panes and work on their behalf — every change you make is recorded as yours, attributed to them.

Billing

Accounts and Payment Details

Accounts lists your Stripe-backed billing accounts — name, balance, currency, invoice prefix, and contact details — with New Account to add one and drill-throughs to that account’s invoices and, with billing permissions, its Payment details: bank transfer information (IBAN/SWIFT or account/routing, depending on currency) and any payment methods on file.

Invoices

Invoices lists every invoice. Pick a status from the select at the start of the search row — Open, Past Due, Draft, Paid, Voided, All — and narrow by invoice number, customer, or master project. When nothing matches, the pane says so and offers Clear Search, which resets your search fields but leaves any filter you arrived with from Home. A draft with no number yet shows Draft in the number column, and the amount columns read Time $, Expenses $, and Items $. New Invoice starts a draft. Opening an invoice shows its header (customer, amounts, due date, status) over three tabs — Items, Time, Trips. Add Time and Add Trips swap the current tab in place for a picker of unbilled time or trips; select what belongs on this invoice and add it in bulk (Add Selected Time or Add Selected Trips, with Back to return). Adding and removing items, time, and trips (Remove Selected) is offered only while the invoice is a draft. A draft invoice can be edited or Submitted, which assigns its invoice number and finalizes it; an open invoice can be Voided. Receipts PDF downloads a single PDF merging every receipt behind the invoice’s billed trips.

Voids

Voids opens the Void Invoices pane, which lists every invoice eligible to void — open or paid — so you can release its billed time and expenses back to the unbilled pool without hunting for the invoice first. Voiding is final: it can’t be undone.

Staying on Top of It

Submitting a sheet mails your approvers; approving, returning, or reopening one mails the member, with your note attached on a return or reopen. Every notification links straight to the sheet it’s about. If you haven’t submitted or gotten a sheet approved for the current week, you get a reminder email on Friday afternoon.

What’s Fixed Along the Way

This release also closes ownership gaps in the older screens the Project app replaces: reading another member’s time, expenses, or receipts required being their approver, and a couple of screens didn’t check that at all. Those are fixed, and no approver — on the new screens or the old ones — can approve their own timesheet or expense report, even from a self-approver relationship that already exists on the account.