Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Wondering what AI in project management can actually do? This article breaks down what it is, what it looks like in practice, how to tell whether your firm is ready, and which tools to consider.

FTE stands for full-time equivalent. It is a unit of work capacity: 1.0 FTE is one person working a full-time schedule, and everything else is expressed as a fraction of that. Two people at 20 hours a week each come to 1.0 FTE in a company where full-time means 40. The formula is one line.

An attendance sheet records who worked, who was absent, and why, day by day. It sits underneath payroll, absence management and any dispute about hours, which is why the format matters more than it looks. The template below is free, works in Excel and Google Sheets, and totals itself. It also carries the part most attendance templates leave out: the FLSA requires employers to keep payroll records for three years and the underlying time records for two.

Most guides treat picking a way to charge clients like picking a paint colour: here's the swatch card, choose what you like. That advice is now wrong, and it's costing firms margin every month. Before I joined Teamwork.com, I spent nine years in agencies watching the same thing happen, and it always started with a model nobody had really chosen on purpose. This guide reframes the decision around one idea, then hands you a test to make it.

Most guides on how to bill a client stop at the invoice: pick Net 30, send a tidy PDF, chase the late payers. That is the paperwork, not the billing. Billing a client profitably is a commercial decision you make long before the invoice goes out, and getting it wrong drains margin every single month. This guide reframes billing as a four-rung climb from work done to margin banked. Expect real numbers and the moves that actually shift the outcome.

Most searches for Smartsheet alternatives begin with a question I could never answer fast at an agency: are we actually making money on this account? I'd have four browser tabs open and still be stuck. One tab held the project plan, one the timesheets, one a finance export, and one a sheet nobody trusted. By the time I stitched them together, the month had closed and we'd already spent the margin. That's the trap with spreadsheet sprawl: the work is visible, but the money isn't.

Ask ten agency leaders what a client costs to deliver and it's likely some will quote you the delivery estimate. That number is almost always too low, because it counts the work that gets invoiced while ignoring the work that doesn't. This guide takes an idea borrowed from supply chains and rebuilds it for client delivery. It's a simple ledger that totals the true cost of serving a client, so you can see which accounts earn their keep.

A closed-won deal should be the easiest project you ever start. You already know the client, the work, and the budget. So why does delivery so often begin from a cold start, digging through a CRM and a sales rep's memory to rebuild what sales promised? That gap is the pipeline to project handoff, and most teams treat it as an afterthought. This guide gives you a framework: the Handoff Ledger.

Strong work deserves an invoice that reflects it accurately, yet I keep seeing the opposite across service teams. You deliver good results all month, then lose two days rebuilding what happened from timesheets, threads, and memory before you can bill. By the time the invoice goes out, few people could defend a single line on it. That gap between delivered work and the client invoice is where margin quietly slips. It usually starts when time tracking and invoicing live in separate places.