Periodic Updates to Billing Rates

Most firms update their billing rates periodically — often annually — but BaseBuilders lets you update your master rates at any time. This article covers how master rate updates flow (or don't flow) into existing projects, and how to sync a batch of projects to your new rates without editing them one at a time.

Master Rate Changes Don't Automatically Apply to Projects

Updating a rate under Settings > Contract Management > Roles does not change anything on projects that already exist. This is intentional — projects are under contract, and their rates may not be allowed to change until the end of that contract, or until you specifically choose to update them.

On an individual project's edit screen, a rate that's out of sync with its linked master rate shows a refresh icon (hover text: "Sync with master billing rate"). Selecting this refreshes that single rate to match the current master value — but doing this project by project, one rate at a time, isn't practical if you have many projects to update.

Updating Rates in Batch

Rather than editing projects individually, you can update billing rates across many projects at once:

1. Find the projects you want to update. Use a query to narrow your project list to a specific group, or select individual projects to cherry-pick which ones get updated. (See a related video on running queries for help building your search.)
2. Select the projects you want to update.
3. From the batch actions dropdown, choose Update Billing Rates.

This updates every rate on the selected projects that is linked to a master rate — both the rate value and, if changed, the rate name.

What Doesn't Get Updated

Custom rates — rates on a project that were never linked to a master rate — are not affected by this sync. These show a gray (unlinked) icon rather than the standard refresh icon, and will keep their existing value regardless of how many times you run the batch update. If you want a custom rate to participate in future syncs, you can link it to a master rate; until then, it stays independent.

Existing time slips are also not affected by a project rate update. Updating a project's billing rates only changes the rate going forward for new time slips — it does not retroactively change rates already stamped on time slips that were recorded before the update. A separate process (covered in another video) lets you apply updated project rates to existing time slips, if that's something you need to do.

Best Practice

Use a query to identify exactly which projects should receive an updated rate, rather than updating everything indiscriminately — since some projects may be contractually locked into their current rates. Remember that linked and custom rates behave differently: only linked rates are touched by a batch update, so review your custom rates separately if they also need adjusting.

Summary

Master rate changes made under Settings do not automatically apply to existing projects. To update rates across many projects at once, query or select the projects you want, then use the Update Billing Rates batch action — this updates only rates linked to a master rate, leaving custom rates untouched. Updated project rates apply going forward and do not retroactively change existing time slips; a separate process handles updating time slips if needed.