In the project dialog, you maintain the master data of a project. The dialog is organised into several tabs that together form the complete project master data. This article walks you through each tab and explains per field what it is for, which values are allowed, and under which conditions it appears.

The further sub-areas of a project, such as project team members, tasks, project plan, and price tables, are not part of this dialog and are described in the article Project administration. All project reports are found in the article Project reports. The editing workflow from creation to deletion is described in the article Creating, editing and deleting projects.

The General tab contains the organisational base data of the project. You assign these fields first when creating, and they appear afterwards in the project overview, in the selection lists of recording, and in the reports.

The Abbreviation is the project number and the unique identifier of the project. It is the only mandatory field in the entire dialog and serves three purposes:

In the Description field, you store the detailed plain-text name of the project with up to 255 characters. It appears in all lists, reports, receipts, and invoices, and can be adjusted at any time without affecting existing references.

In the selection lists of project time and receipt recording, the description is shown together with the abbreviation: the abbreviation in full, the description abbreviated for space reasons. This way, the description makes the concise abbreviation more meaningful for employees and eases the selection of the right project.

The Run time defines the start and end date of the project. An empty end date means unlimited duration. Start and end date additionally serve as a filter criterion in project planning and appear on reports and invoices.

The Status shows the current project status from the selection list. It directly controls the bookability: only projects with a status configured as bookable are offered in the selection lists of time and receipt recording. When creating a new project, the first status defined in the master data is preset. The full status list with order and bookability is maintained by administrators under Administration > Projects > Project status.

The Department assigns the project to an organisational unit. It controls the visibility for department managers and is the basis for the department reports under Reports > Departments. Project planning can be filtered by this criterion, which supports decentralised organisations in steering per location.

Via Categories, you optionally assign one or several classifications to the project, for example a separation into consulting, implementation, or support projects. Categories serve as a filter in the project overview and as a grouping in the reports. The available categories are created by administrators; the procedure is described in the article Projects – Administration.

Keywords offer an additional, freely selectable classification alongside the categories, for example for industries or technology stacks. They appear as a filter in the project overview and as a grouping in reports. Creating the keyword master data and the setting that also lets project leads add their own keywords is described in the article Projects – Administration.

With the Color, you assign an identifying colour to the project. ZEP uses it to colour the project time bookings of this project in the calendar and time-recording views, so that bookings of different projects can be distinguished quickly at a glance. The assignment is optional and changeable at any time.

The Remark is a free notes area with simple text formatting. It appears exclusively in the project detail view and in no external document. Useful for internal hints for the project lead or the accounting team, for example on special conditions, agreements, or a reference to the contract.

Below the remark, the freely configurable additional attributes appear, provided your company has defined any. This way, project-individual additional information can be captured in a structured way and then used as a dedicated column in the project overview. How administrators create additional attributes with field type and behaviour is described in the article Projects – Administration.

The Plan tab bundles the target values of the project. Via them, the later plan-actual comparison takes place in the reports Project status (plan) and Overall status (plan). For flat-rate billing, the plan values additionally serve as the amount to be invoiced.

Under Planned hours, you store the hour budget of the overall project. Two ways are possible:

If more hours are planned below than specified above, ZEP points out a planning difference. The planned hours are then the comparison value against the actually booked actual hours.

The fields Actual hours and Bill. actual hrs are pure display values and are not maintained manually. Actual hours shows all hours booked on the project, Bill. actual hrs only the hours booked as billable. Both compare the current booking status against the planned budget.

With Prevent overbooking, you control whether more hours may be booked than planned. The following levels are available, each optionally with or without travel times:

Additionally, you can set an overbooking limit per day, that is a maximum number of hours per day, provided an overbooking limit is active at project level at all.

Here you define per project whether and when the project lead with budget responsibility is notified once the booked actual hours reach a certain percentage of the planned hours. Depending on the configuration, only the hours booked as billable or all hours are counted. Three settings are available:

The check runs on every time booking at task and at project level; per threshold, up to two e-mails can therefore be triggered. The prerequisite is that planned hours are stored for the project or the task. If ZEP finds no project lead with budget responsibility, the same fallback chain as for overbooking applies (project lead without budget responsibility, then department management, then administrators).

The Plan Total rates are the planned billable revenue from working time, calculated from planned hours times hourly rate, or, for flat-rate projects, the agreed flat price for the working time. The value can be assigned fixed for the overall project or dynamically per task. For a discount, you enter a minus sign directly before the amount.

The Plan Total rates are the target value for the revenue comparison: ZEP compares them against the actually achieved revenue in the reports Project status (plan) and Overall status (plan). For flat-rate projects, they are at the same time the amount to be invoiced for the working time. As with the planned hours, ZEP shows a value aggregated from the tasks in italics with the suffix (dyn).

In these fields, you plan the billable additional costs of the project:

These plan values, too, feed into the reports Project status (plan) and Overall status (plan) and serve the target-actual comparison of the additional costs. For flat-rate projects, together with the Plan Total rates they form the total flat price (total rates plus receipts and mileage plus travel flat rates).

The Customer & Invoice tab bundles the commercial fields of the project: the customer assignment, the addresses for invoicing, and the billing logic.

Via Customer, you assign the project to a client or mark it as an internal project without customer assignment. From the assignment, the invoice address, tax rate, and price logic are pre-filled. A later change is possible but can overwrite existing pre-fills; with running invoicing transactions, caution is advised. If invoicing to multiple customers is active, the primary customer is shown here. The master data of the selectable customers is maintained in customer management; creating them is described in the article Creating, editing and deleting customers.

The Customer contact person is selected from the list of all contact persons of the assigned customer. When the project is invoiced, this person is preset as the invoice recipient. You do not maintain new contact persons here, but directly at the customer record in customer management, from where the list is fed.

In the optional Customer order field, you store an order or project name under which the project is known at the customer. This value appears on the project revenue and customer revenue reports as well as on the invoice, so that your customer can more easily assign the invoice to their own order.

The fields Order number and Job number hold the customer-side reference numbers of the project. Both are available as configurable columns in the project overview and can be printed on the invoice, which eases the assignment in the ordering process of larger customers.

Via the Revenue account, you assign the project revenue to a bookkeeping account for the handover to the external accounting. This enables a separate revenue analysis by business field or result unit. Per revenue account, the revenues can then be filtered specifically in the accounting export and handed over to the finance system.

The Invoice address and the Delivery address are taken over from the customer data by default (selection - Customer invoice address - or - Customer delivery address -). Only if the invoices of this project are to go to a different address do you select another address from the customer address list. The addresses themselves are maintained in customer management.

With the option Allow invoicing to multiple customers, you assign several customers to a project, for example for consortia or shared orders. The primary customer remains the main contact, the additional customers are billed proportionally. The management of the assigned customers then takes place in the billing settings sub-area of the project.

The Language controls which texts, for example invoice texts, are used automatically for this project. The Currency is applied in invoicing and in the reports; receipts in other currencies are automatically converted into the project currency, and the project price tables are understood in this currency. Both values are pre-filled from the customer and can be overridden per project.

Cost Center and Cost Unit assign the project to the internal cost accounting and are used in the export to the external accounting. You select the Cost Center from the master data, the cost unit is captured as a number or free text depending on the configuration.

The Type of accounting is the standard billing logic for all tasks of the project and controls which further fields appear in the tab. It determines whether a price list is needed and how billable actual hours, receipts, and travel costs are billed.

The following types of accounting are available:

With the checkbox Account for tasks separately, you bill the tasks of a project separately with their own amounts each, instead of collectively for the overall project. This is useful for mixed projects in which individual tasks have a billing type that differs from the project, for example a flat-rate conception followed by effort-based implementations.

By default, all tasks have the billing type like project, and the project is billed as a whole. As soon as at least one task has a deviating billing type or you activate this option, the overall billing is composed of the individual task billings. The following applies:

The field Daily rates offered appears for billing by daily rate, provided the tasks are not billed individually. Here you enter the number of planned or offered daily rates. The value is considered in the report Project status (plan) as a planned comparison value for the overall project.

If the tasks are billed individually, no entry is possible here; you then store the offered daily rates per task. This way, the planned daily-rate scope stays correctly assigned to the respective task even in mixed projects.

The Address tab holds the geographic details of the project as well as a hyperlink to an external resource. These fields are optional and serve documentation and quick navigation, for example to a linked CRM record or a contract document.

In the fields Country and Federal state, you optionally capture the geographic reference of the project. The entry is useful especially where projects are run across several locations or countries and are to be classified geographically in reports or travel-cost contexts.

In the URL field, you store any hyperlink for the project, for example to a Salesforce opportunity, a contract document, or a project room. In the project overview, the link is shown as an icon; a click on it opens the stored address, the tooltip shows the full URL.

The XRechnung tab appears exclusively when a machine-readable invoice format (XRechnung or ZUGFeRD) is stored for the assigned customer. It holds the mandatory details required for electronic invoicing to public-sector clients as well as to many corporate customers. The following fields are available:

Since these details are part of the electronic invoice format, you should maintain them completely before the first XRechnung is generated for the project.