PROJ: Client Engagements, Projects, and Issue Tracking

PROJ is the orchestration spine of CyberOS — the module where a won CRM deal becomes a live client engagement, where work breaks into projects and issues, and where every billable hour flows forward into TIME and ultimately into INV invoices. When an Account Manager clicks Convert to Engagement on a closed deal, PROJ creates the Engagement with the rate card pre-wired from the deal’s pricing, wires billable rules to roles, and opens the billing cycle. From that moment, every time entry logged in TIME against the Engagement traces a clean audit chain back to a specific issue, a specific member, and a specific rate — giving you invoice-grade traceability without manual re-keying.

PROJ is a P1 module currently in the design phase. This page describes the planned functionality from the user perspective. Refer to the platform roadmap for GA availability details.

Data model

PROJ organises work in a four-level hierarchy. Everything billable lives under an Engagement; nothing drifts outside that hierarchy.

Workspace

The top-level tenant container. All Engagements, Projects, and Issues belong to a single Workspace and inherit its member roster and default rate settings.

Engagement

The client-facing billing unit. Carries a rate card, billing mode (T&M, fixed-fee, or retainer), non-billable category list, and a link back to the originating CRM deal.

Project

A logical grouping of Issues within an Engagement. Use Projects to separate work-streams, phases, or deliverable areas under the same client contract.

Issue

The atomic unit of work. Issues carry status, assignee, priority, and an optional billable override. Time entries logged against an Issue inherit the Engagement’s billable rules unless the Issue overrides them.

Creating an Engagement

You can create an Engagement in two ways: from a won CRM deal, or directly in PROJ.

From a won CRM deal (recommended)

Open the deal in CRM

Navigate to the deal record and confirm the stage is Closed Won.

Click Convert to Engagement

Select Convert to Engagement from the deal actions menu. PROJ automatically creates the Engagement with the rate card pre-populated from the deal’s pricing page, and links the deal’s contract URL and client account to the new Engagement.

Choose a billing mode

Select Time & Materials, Fixed-Fee, or Retainer. This choice locks once the Engagement is created — choose carefully, as changing billing mode mid-cycle requires a new Engagement.

Review the rate card

Confirm the per-role rates (VND and USD) and the billable default for each role. Adjust if the deal pricing differs from your default rate card.

Save

The Engagement is live. Members can begin logging TIME entries against it immediately.

Creating an Engagement directly

If the work does not originate from a CRM deal (for example, an internal project or a pre-sales pilot), open PROJ → New Engagement and fill in the client account, billing mode, and rate card manually. You can link it to a CRM account later.

Not every won deal should become a PROJ Engagement. Pure resale deals — where you are collecting payment without delivering services — do not need an Engagement. The deal-to-Engagement conversion requires an explicit Account Manager action for this reason.

Managing issues

Issues are the day-to-day work surface in PROJ. Each Issue lives under a Project, which lives under an Engagement.

Creating an issue

Open the Project board and click New Issue. Set the title, description, priority, and assignee. If the Issue involves work that should be tracked against a different billable rule than the Project default, tick Override billable flag and set the value explicitly.

Assigning issues to members

Drag the Issue to a member’s lane on the Board view, or open the Issue and select the assignee from the member picker. You can assign to any member who has access to the Engagement. CUO’s next-best-action signal (see AI features below) will surface recommended assignees based on role and current workload.

Tracking status

Issues move through a configurable status workflow. The default statuses are Backlog → In Progress → In Review → Done → Cancelled. Workspace admins can add custom statuses and define transition rules (for example, requiring a reviewer before an Issue can move to Done).

Use the Timeline view to spot Issues that have been stuck in the same status for more than a week. The CUO next-best-action signal flags these automatically on your dashboard.

Billable hours rules engine

Every time entry in TIME that references a PROJ Issue goes through a four-step cascade to determine whether it is billable. The decision is recorded on the entry at write time — retroactive rate-card changes never shift past entries.

Step 1 — Member override

If the member logging the entry has an explicit billable override set on the Engagement, that value wins. This handles cases like a non-billable senior reviewer whose time you want to record but not charge.

Step 2 — Task class (non-billable categories)

Each Engagement carries a list of non-billable categories (for example, internal-admin, pre-sales, travel). If the Issue’s category matches one of these, the entry is non-billable regardless of role.

Step 3 — Role default

The rate card on the Engagement specifies a billable default per role (for example, architect: true, intern: false). If neither Step 1 nor Step 2 applies, the member’s role default is used.

Step 4 — Fallback

If no override, category rule, or role default resolves the flag, the entry is billable. The fallback is always billable, so unclassified work never silently drops off an invoice.

Changing non-billable categories on a live Engagement affects only new time entries. Past entries retain their recorded billable flag. If you need to retroactively correct an entry’s billable status, use TIME’s correction model to create a new corrected entry.

Rate cards

A rate card defines per-role pricing on an Engagement. Each role entry specifies a VND rate, an optional USD rate, and a billable default flag.

# Example Engagement rate card
roles:
  - role: architect
    rate_vnd_per_hour: 2_500_000
    rate_usd_per_hour: 100
    billable_default: true
  - role: senior-engineer
    rate_vnd_per_hour: 1_800_000
    rate_usd_per_hour: 72
    billable_default: true
  - role: mid-engineer
    rate_vnd_per_hour: 1_200_000
    rate_usd_per_hour: 48
    billable_default: true
  - role: junior-engineer
    rate_vnd_per_hour: 700_000
    rate_usd_per_hour: 28
    billable_default: true
  - role: account-manager
    rate_vnd_per_hour: 1_500_000
    rate_usd_per_hour: 60
    billable_default: false

The rate card is locked at Engagement creation when the deal-to-Engagement bridge fires. You can edit it before the first TIME rollup, but once INV has pulled a billable summary, rate changes apply only to future billing cycles.

For fixed-fee Engagements, the rate card still matters: it powers the internal margin watchdog (P2) that compares hours-at-rate against the fixed contract value and warns you of scope creep before the Engagement goes underwater.

PROJ → TIME → INV spine

PROJ, TIME, and INV form the revenue-delivery spine of CyberOS. Here is how data flows across the three modules:

PROJ

Defines Engagements, Projects, Issues, and the billable rules that govern each time entry. Every Issue is the anchor point for billable work.

TIME

Members log time against PROJ Issues. Each entry goes through the billable cascade, and the decision is recorded. At billing cycle close, TIME rolls up approved billable hours per member per role per Engagement.

INV

Consumes the TIME rollup and generates invoice line items. Each line item traces back to a TIME entry, which traces back to a PROJ Issue — giving you a clean audit chain from invoice to work item.

The rollup event carries rate-card snapshots, member overrides, and approval-flow flags. INV draws the draft invoice; the Account Manager reviews it; the client receives the final bill. Every invoice line is fully traceable to a specific time entry and the work item it records.

AI features

CUO (CyberOS’s AI orchestration layer) provides two classes of intelligent assistance in PROJ.

Next-best-action on open issues

CUO continuously monitors open Issues across your Engagements and surfaces next-best-action recommendations on your dashboard. Recommendations are ranked by urgency and include suggested assignees based on role, capacity, and past performance on similar Issues. Recommendations are always proposals — CUO never auto-assigns or auto-closes an Issue.

Performance review calibration signals

At the end of a review cycle, CUO synthesises each member’s Issue history — completion rate, billable hours contribution, comment patterns, and revision frequency — into calibration signals for HR performance reviews. These signals are grounded in the audit chain and cite specific Issues and time periods, making the calibration evidence-based rather than anecdotal.

Integrations

PROJ connects to five other CyberOS modules. Each integration is auditable — every cross-module event is recorded in the audit trail.

Module	Direction	What flows
CRM	CRM → PROJ	Won deal triggers Engagement creation. Rate card and client account details are pre-wired.
TIME	PROJ → TIME	Engagements, Projects, and Issues are the reference targets for every time entry. Billable cascade rules originate in PROJ.
INV	TIME → INV (via PROJ rules)	Billable rollup at cycle close drives INV invoice line items. Rate-card snapshots travel with the rollup.
HR	PROJ → HR	Issue completion history and billable contribution flow to HR as calibration signals for performance reviews.
KB	KB ↔ PROJ	Issues can cite KB documents as authority sources. CUO grounds next-best-action suggestions in KB runbooks and decision logs.

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Platform

PROJ: Client Engagements, Projects, and Issue Tracking

Data model

Workspace

Engagement

Project

Issue

Creating an Engagement

From a won CRM deal (recommended)

Creating an Engagement directly

Managing issues

Creating an issue

Assigning issues to members

Tracking status

Billable hours rules engine

Rate cards

PROJ → TIME → INV spine

PROJ

TIME

INV

AI features

Integrations

​Data model

Workspace

Engagement

Project

Issue

​Creating an Engagement

​From a won CRM deal (recommended)

​Creating an Engagement directly

​Managing issues

​Creating an issue

​Assigning issues to members

​Tracking status

​Billable hours rules engine

​Rate cards

​PROJ → TIME → INV spine

PROJ

TIME

INV

​AI features

​Integrations

Data model

Creating an Engagement

From a won CRM deal (recommended)

Creating an Engagement directly

Managing issues

Creating an issue

Assigning issues to members

Tracking status

Billable hours rules engine

Rate cards

PROJ → TIME → INV spine

AI features

Integrations