Last Modified On: June 16, 2025
This help article has been updated to reflect the enhancements and new Rate Card feature included in the June 2025 Major Release, which will be available starting June 24, 2025.
When “Use Effort to Calculate Cost” is enabled in Inspire Planner, task costs are automatically calculated based on the effort and the assigned resource’s hourly rates. By default, this setting is turned off, meaning you will need to enter task costs manually unless you choose to enable it.
When this setting is enabled, Inspire Planner will automatically populate:
This automation simplifies cost tracking and ensures consistency between budgeted and actual costs.
How Project Team Billable Rate and Cost Rates are Populated:
When you create Project Team records for a project and enter values for the Billable Rate and Cost Rate, Inspire Planner will use those rates for the resource’s Salesforce tasks and time entries. If you’ve attached a Rate Card, Inspire Planner will prioritize and use the rates from the Rate Card instead.
If you manually edit the Project Team Billable Rate or Cost Rate after applying a Rate Card, Inspire Planner will respect your manual entries. However, if you later attach a different Rate Card to that Project Team record, the new Rate Card’s rates will overwrite the values you previously entered.
This gives you flexibility to adjust rates manually, while ensuring consistency if you apply a new Rate Card.
When you create Project Team records for a project and leave the Billable Rate and Cost Rate fields blank, Inspire Planner follows a specific order to find the rates:
Inspire Planner first checks if a Rate Card is linked to the Project Team. If a Rate Card is attached, the Billable Rate and Cost Rate on the Project Team are automatically populated with the values from the Rate Card.
If there’s no Rate Card, it looks for a Resource Profile and uses the Default Billable Rate and Default Cost Rate from there to populate the Project Team Billable Rate and Cost Rate.
If the Resource Profile does not have rates defined, Inspire Planner will then reference the Hourly Rate from the User or Contact record as the Default Billable Rate. Note that there is no Default Cost Rate on the User or Contact record—Default Cost Rate is only available in the Resource Profile.
How Salesforce Task Billable Rate is populated:
When a Project Task is assigned to a resource, Inspire Planner automatically fills in the Billable Rate on the Salesforce Task from the resource's Project Team.
How Time Entry Rates are populated:
When a resource logs time, Inspire Planner automatically fills in the Billable Rate and Cost Rate on the time entry based on the following:
Time Entry Billable Rate:
Pulled from the Billable Rate on the Project Team record if:
The resource (Time Entry owner) has a matching Project Team record and
The Task Role matches the Project Team Role.
Time Entry Cost Rate:
Pulled from the Cost Rate on the Project Team record if there’s a matching record (same conditions as above).
If there’s no matching Project Team record or if the Cost Rate on the Project Team is blank, Inspire Planner uses the Default Cost Rate from the resource’s Resource Profile instead.
In project and resource management, a rate card typically refers to a set of predefined rates associated with different types of work, roles, or resources.
A rate card helps define:
Billing rates based on factors like resource type, location, skill level, or customer agreements.
Cost rates for internal tracking (what it costs your company to employ the resource) vs. billable rates (what you charge the client).
Why it’s useful:
Ensures consistent pricing for services across projects.
Makes it easier to generate accurate project budgets, quotes, and invoices.
Supports more advanced reporting and profitability analysis.
Please note:
In this section, you’ll learn how to set up rate cards for your resources.
To add more rate cards for the resource, simply repeat the steps above.
When you add a resource to the project team and do not assign a rate card, Inspire Planner will automatically use the resource’s Default Billable Rate and Default Cost Rate from their Resource Profile.
You can define a resource’s Default Billable Rate and Default Cost Rate within their Resource Profile, accessible from either the Resource Management tab or the Resource Profile tab.
One way to populate or update the resource's Default Billable Rate and Default Cost Rate is from the Resource Management Tab.
Another way to populate or update the resource's Default Billable Rate and Default Cost Rate is from the Resource Profile Tab.
Please note the following:
Updating the billable and cost rates on a rate card does not retroactively update any project team records where the rate card has already been applied. Existing project team records will continue to use the rates that were in place when the rate card was originally selected.
Updating the Default Billable Rate or Default Cost Rate on the resource profile or updating the Hourly Rate on the user/contact record will not update any of the resource's existing project team records.
This section will walk you through how to enable the setting to use effort to calculate cost.
Once the setting is enabled, it will start to populate your Cost fields based on Effort and Hourly Rate for new entries. In order for the cost fields to recalculate and populate existing data, you will need to reconcile data.