Key Concepts

PayMe has a specific way of thinking about time and money. Once you understand these five ideas, the rest of the product makes sense.

1. The budget chain

Every hour of work traces back to a client quote. The chain looks like this:

Quote (FiC) → Project → [Period] → Allocation → Task → Time Entry

• A FiC quote line item becomes a project with a total budget in hours.
• The PM optionally breaks the project into periods (e.g., March, April). Projects without periods use a single budget.
• Within each period (or directly under the project), the PM creates allocations — assigning a number of hours to a specific team member and function (e.g., "Marco / Design / 20h").
• The member creates tasks inside their allocation (e.g., "Homepage mockup / 8h estimated").
• Time entries are the actual logged hours against those tasks.

At every level there are two numbers: budgeted and logged. The difference is what remains.

See Budget Model for the PM's view of this chain.

2. Allocated vs Logged — never conflate them

This is the most important distinction in PayMe.

Remaining hours = allocated − logged.

The planner uses remaining hours to decide how much future work to schedule. If you over-log (log more than you estimated), remaining goes negative, and the planner stops scheduling that task.

3. Plan (agenda) vs Log (actual)

PayMe maintains two separate timelines:

• Plan — the agenda. What you're supposed to do, arranged in your day. Computed by the scheduler.
• Log — time entries. What you actually did. Recorded by starting/stopping timers or manual entry.

The plan is immutable for past days. Yesterday's agenda stays as it was, even if you didn't do what was scheduled. This keeps history honest.

Logging updates the future plan. When you log 2h on a task, its remaining hours drop by 2h, and the planner recalculates future days accordingly.

This separation is what makes PayMe useful for analysis — you can compare what was planned vs what was logged, day by day, without the plan silently rewriting itself.

4. Three time modes

There are exactly three ways to interact with time in PayMe:

1. Allocating — Planning future work. A PM assigns hours to a member. This creates agenda items.
2. Logging — Recording past work. You enter a time entry manually or stop a timer.
3. Tracking — An active timer running right now. Stopping it creates a log entry.

These three modes are kept strictly separate. You can't accidentally allocate when you mean to log.

5. The planner: Rocks and Water

The scheduler fills your day like a jar. Rocks go in first — they're fixed. Then water fills the remaining space.

• Rocks — items with an explicit start time: meetings, calls, logged entries with a pinned time. They don't move.
• Water — flexible tasks without a fixed start time. The planner packs them tightly around the rocks, respecting your work schedule and break.

When you move or resize a rock, the water reflows automatically. You never have to manually rearrange flexible tasks.

See How the Planner Works for the full explanation.

6. Data validity

PayMe keeps an append-only history of operational facts. Two independent automated checks protect it:

• Reconciliation proves that the event history and current view agree.
• Integrity validation proves that current values are usable: dates and times are real, hours are non-negative, and statuses are known.

Both checks are required. Agreement alone cannot detect a malformed value copied consistently into both views.

7. Due modes

Tasks have three deadline modes: