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Small and medium business | Business Central, N...
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Best practices for tracking project hours

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We had an ask from our finance department to look in to tracking hours in an effort to tell when buckets of service hours were getting close to being used up. They can currently do this, but is a manual process that they use in Excel. We have Project Operations in CRM and Business Central online. Currently, we aren't using the quantity remaining/apply link usage/quantity used. The issue we have is the way our resources are set up as individual users, so this would be fine if only one person was working on a project but that isn't typical. Usually there will be multiple individual contributors on a project, so the hours only subtract from an individual quantity for that resource and the "total" hours aren't exactly a total hour bucket for the entire project. I was just wondering how other companies may be handling that or if someone could direct me to Business Central best practices forums that might have something related to that. Further, we enter the information for the projects and actuals in CRM/Dataverse, we have a Powerautomate flow that kicks off and syncs the data over to BC, from there that's when they push the actuals to invoicing etc. Hope that helps. Any recommendations are welcome. Thanks. 
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  • Suggested answer
    YUN ZHU Profile Picture
    99,086 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at
  • Suggested answer
    OussamaSabbouh Profile Picture
    12,965 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at
    Hello,

    Your setup is tracking individual capacity, not the project's shared bucket. You're right, that won't work.
    The best fix is to stop budgeting by individual resource. Instead:
    Create one Resource Group (e.g., "Project Team").
    Put the total project hours (e.g., 100) on that single Resource Group line in your budget.
    When your team members (who are part of that group) post time, BC will automatically pull from that one shared bucket.
    Alternatively, you can use a non-inventory Item (like "PREPAID-HOURS") as the single budget line.

    Regards,
    Oussama
  • Suggested answer
    Aman Kakkar Profile Picture
    2,977 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at
    Hi,
     
    In my last company we used to consume the combination of Timesheet and Project module of Business central. Here's how - 
     
    • Project (Job) → represents the client engagement or project bucket.

          In the Project module itself, there are sub-modules - 
       
      • Job Tasks → optional breakdown by phase or type of work (e.g., Consulting, Development).
         
      • Job Planning Lines → define budgeted hours (per task or project), either:
         
        • Role-based (Consultant, Developer) for shared buckets.
        • Resource-based (individuals) if you want to track per-person consumption
            
    • Timesheets → used by individual contributors to log actual hours.
       
    • Job Journal or Time Sheet Posting → posts actual hours against Job/Job Task.

     

    This approach allows Finance to see:

    • Total hours used per project.
    • Remaining hours per bucket.
    • Individual resource usage (optional).
    Hope this helps.
    Aman K

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