Scheduling automatic rate increases

Rates rarely stay still. If your agreement with a client includes an annual uplift, Workroom can apply it for you — on the right date, every year, without anyone remembering to do it.

Where: Settings → Rate increases (under How work runs). You can also set one up from a project's Team & billing tab while creating or editing it. Both lead to the same place.

How it works, in one paragraph

You tell Workroom two things: when the rates go up, and by how much. From then on, any time logged on or after that date is priced at the new rate, and it happens again on the same date every year. Nothing runs overnight and nothing needs approving. There's no "apply now" button because there's nothing to apply — Workroom works the rate out whenever it needs one.

One schedule per project. A project that's already scheduled won't appear in the picker again.

Setting one up

1. Go to Settings → Rate increases and click + Schedule an increase

2. Project — pick from your projects

3. Renewal date — the first increase lands on this date, then the same month and day every year

4. Increase — either type a percentage, or switch on "Work it out from a target rate"

5. Client notice — how many days ahead the client is emailed (0 = don't tell them)

Before you save, the page shows what it does to that project's average hourly rate — for example $130 → $140.40. Worth a glance; it's the quickest way to catch a percentage typed into the wrong box.

The two ways to enter an increase

Percentage — straightforward. 8% means every service rate on that project goes up 8%.

Target rate — for when you've agreed a specific number with a client. Pick a service, type what its rate should become, and Workroom works out the percentage. If Design is $130 and you say it should be $145, that's 11.5%.

Important: the percentage is what gets stored and applied. An 11.5% uplift calculated from Design is applied to every service rate on that project — Site Visit, Project Management, everything. A dollar figure only describes one service; the percentage it implies is what can be applied across the board. The page tells you the percentage before you commit, so you can sanity-check it.

What it affects

The increase reaches every rate on the project: the studio defaults, any rate set for the project as a whole, and any rate set for a specific person on that project. All of them, by the same percentage.

That flows through to everything that prices an hour:

• The timer and manual time entries

• Estimates — a service added to an estimate quotes the rate that applies today

• Invoices

• Budgets and reports

What it does not affect

Time you've already logged. An hour logged in March at $130 stays at $130 forever, even after a January increase. Invoices already sent never change, and neither do the numbers in a report you ran last quarter.

This is the single most important thing to understand: an increase reaches future time only. It's not a repricing of your history.

Who gets told

Your client, if you set a notice period. They get an email the chosen number of days before the increase, using the Rate Increase Notice template in Settings → Email templates. It goes to the project's client — not to stakeholders, contractors or anyone else copied into the project. A rate change is between you and whoever pays the bill.

You can edit that template's wording and subject line. Leave it alone and a sensible default is sent. The placeholders available are {client-name}, {project-name}, {effective-date}, {increase-percent} and {company-name}.

Your team, on the day. The account owner and everyone assigned to the project get a short email confirming it's taken effect. It's also written to the project's activity log, so there's a permanent record.

Tips

Set the renewal date to the contract anniversary. If your agreement says rates rise each year on the signing date, use that date. Then the system and the contract agree, and nobody has to reconcile them later.

Give more notice than your contract requires. If the agreement promises 30 days' notice, set 45. The email goes out automatically, so the extra margin costs you nothing and removes any argument about whether notice was given.

Use the target-rate mode when you've quoted a number. If you've told a client "Design goes to $145 in January", enter it that way rather than doing the percentage arithmetic yourself. Less chance of a rounding argument.

Check the average rate impact line before saving. It's the fastest sanity check — an 800% increase looks obviously wrong there in a way that 800 in a small box does not.

Remember it compounds. 8% a year on $100 is $108, then $116.64, then $125.97 — not $124. Over a long project that adds up faster than people expect.

Things to watch out for

Don't backdate the renewal date. If you set a renewal date in the past, Workroom treats every anniversary since then as having happened. A date three years ago with 8% compounds three times immediately, and new time is priced at roughly 26% above your current rates. If you want an increase to start now, use today's date or a future one.

Switching off is not the same as removing. The toggle pauses future increases and keeps the schedule, so you can switch it back on. The ✕ removes the schedule entirely. Neither undoes increases that have already applied — rates that have risen don't come back down, because that time has already been billed.

Changing your mind is fine. Edit the date, the percentage, or the notice period at any time. Because Workroom stores the rule rather than rewriting your rates, changing it simply changes what happens from here.

Archived and completed projects. An increase on a finished project is harmless — nobody's logging time to it, so there's nothing to reprice. The row shows an Archived note so you know why it looks dormant. If the project comes back to life, the schedule is still there.

A per-person rate still gets the increase. If you've set a specific rate for someone on a project under Team & billing, the annual increase applies to it too. The increase is a project-wide uplift, not a replacement for individual rates.

Answering "why did this rate change?"

Months later, when someone asks why an hour costs what it costs, the answer is on the Rate increases page: the schedule that caused it is still there, and each row shows how many times it's applied and since when.

That's deliberate. Workroom keeps the rule, not just the resulting number — so the explanation never gets lost.