Rate cards

A rate card is your price list: what an hour or a day of a given kind of work costs the client. Defining rates once — instead of remembering them per invoice — is how your pricing stays consistent across projects, proposals and invoices.

Find them under Business → Rate cards.

How rates are used

• Projects pick up rates for costing and billing time — a time & materials project turns logged hours into billable amounts at the project's rates, and fee-based projects use rates to value the effort burned against the fee.
• Project-specific overrides — a project can carry its own rates where you've agreed something special, without touching your standard card.
• Proposals and invoices draw on the same numbers, so the price quoted, the price worked and the price billed agree with each other.

Rates vs cost rates

Don't confuse the two sides of the margin:

• Rate cards are what you charge — client-facing.
• Cost rates are what your time costs — internal, admin-only.

Margin is the daylight between them, and Ambital keeps both dated so the daylight is measured honestly.

Reviewing your pricing

Rates set in January have a habit of still being there in December. When you review pricing (see Business → Pricing for the calculator side), update the rate card and new work picks it up — existing agreements keep the rates they were sold at.

Tip: fewer, clearer rates beat a menu. Two or three well-named rates ("Advisory", "Delivery") are easier to quote, easier to defend, and much easier to raise.