Workspaces

Engagements

An engagement is the unit of client work — a file. It's where time, file health, deliverables, and economics come together. This page covers how engagements are set up and what each setting changes.

Client vs engagement

A client (organization) is who you work for; an engagement is a specific piece of work for them. One client can have several engagements — a tax file, an advisory retainer, a one-off project. Time and economics roll up from engagements to the client.

Engagement kinds

• Project — scoped or fixed-fee work with a budget and an end. Recovery compares realized value to the standard value of the hours.
• Retainer — ongoing work with a monthly hours allotment. The snapshot shows retainer burn: this month's hours vs the allotment.
• Internal — non-billable firm work (Admin, Internal Meetings, BD Discovery, Team Leadership). Excluded from recovery and margin so it never drags down client numbers.

Time-tracking settings

Each engagement carries a billable default (inherited by the time logged against it) and a time-tracking enabledflag. Internal engagements log non-billable automatically; people don't choose billable per entry. Only active or pausedengagements appear in the time grid's add-row picker.

Archiving and reopening

When an engagement is archived, its existing time stays visible in historical weeks and keeps feeding analytics for the periods it covers, but new time is blocked — Ventura rejects it with a clear message, and the engagement drops out of the add-row picker and copy-forward. A partner can reopen it, which re-enables time tracking.

Financial visibility

Hours are visible to anyone assigned to the engagement. The dollar figures — value, cost, margin, recovery, WIP — are partner/finance-only, stored in finance-gated tables. So a manager or staffer on the file sees the work and the hours, never the economics. See Roles & access.

File health

Every engagement carries a health pill (Healthy / Watch / At risk / Setup needed / Paused) computed from real flags: no owner, no next action, recovery below target, WIP to bill, hours over budget, client input overdue. The weekly review in Clients walks the exposed files in order.