Project status and billing

I'm really not sure if we are not seeing something obvious or our business model is vastly atypical, so I am looking for some input on using Intervals. We have successfully been managing projects and task in Intervals for a few months now. We really like many of the features and are hoping for some updates that will make it even better. Unfortunately, we are also paying for and using Timefox to enter and track our time against projects since we cannot seem to get the information we need to manage our company, or bill our clients from Intervals.

The high-level explanation is this: we need to track billable and non-billable hours to projects that may be fixed, hourly, or internal. We need to measure performance of our staff based on the hours they spend that are billable vs. non-billable, working within project budgets, etc. We need to know if fixed projects are profitable or not. We need to know where we are in the project process and, to some extent, gage workflow and resource availability.

The biggest obstacle we keep confronting is that the project in Interval has no billing type (fixed, hourly, internal) and no status (design, copy, programming, testing, completed, etc.) We need to be able to run an open project report weekly sorted by status and project manager. Currently, this has to come from Timefox because we cannot store this in Intervals. Then, when it comes to billing, we don't know which projects are completed and ready to bill (we bill work in process for hourly projects but on completion for fixed.) It seems billing in Intervals is on the task level not the project level and that just doesn’t work for us.

One possible solution may be to just have a couple of user-defined fields on the project. We could use one for type and one for status. If we had the ability to report on these user-defined fields, we could get our weekly project status report and we would be close on the billing. (In fact, user-defined fields on all entities would be useful – clients, tasks, etc.)

I'd really like to remove Timefox from our process but I am at a loss for how to do this. I don't want to go back to reviewing PM solutions but we really cannot justify paying for two services.

Thoughts?

## Update ##
Intervals includes the ability to create project labels. Project labels are flexible and can be used to help with this. More information on how project labels work is available here on the help site.