T&M project management without spreadsheets

Plan resources, track hours, control margin and billing: all in one AI chat.

Managing T&M projects with generic tools is a nightmare

Microsoft Project doesn't manage per-role rates. Jira doesn't know what an invoice is. Excel doesn't scale. Result: PMs spend half their time on admin instead of with clients.

Consultant allocation decided via email and chat
Hours logged in personal Excel sheets
Project margin known only retrospectively
Budget overruns discovered too late
Client reporting built by hand every month

PM tool native for T&M

hice.ai gives PMs everything they need to govern a T&M project: resource plan, hours, milestones, margin, client communication. All in chat.

"Status of the Eni project today"
"Replace Marco with Anna on BNL from Dec 15"
"Generali project margin this month"
"Generate work status report for Intesa"

Try it in chat

Examples you can ask:

Static demo of hice's AI chat.

What you get

Resource planning

Plan consultants per project/month with rates and availability.

Milestone tracking

Progress per phase, deliverable, client acceptance.

Live burn-rate

Hours consumed vs budgeted, alerts on overruns.

Real-time margin

Internal cost vs client revenue per project.

Client status reporting

Auto report for the client, generated with one command.

Smooth resource swaps

Replacements managed with automatic billing propagation.

The economic layer a task tool does not model

Classic project tools model tasks, dependencies and dates. On a time-and-materials engagement what has to be modelled is different: who works, at what rate, for how many hours and against which contract. Without that economic layer the plan can be perfectly on schedule while the margin deteriorates unseen.

The usual result is an organization keeping the plan in one tool, hours in another and the margin calculation in a spreadsheet someone rebuilds every month. It works with five projects; with twenty-five it stops working and different versions of the same number appear depending on who prepares the report.

Rates by role and client tied to the current contract
Hours booked to project, activity and approval period
Consumption against budget visible during the project
Margin calculated with the real cost of assigned people

Scope creep: catching it before it becomes a dispute

The silent growth of scope is the main cause of time-based projects that end badly. It rarely arrives as a formal request: it arrives as a series of small favours, each reasonable on its own, that accumulate until they consume unplanned weeks.

The defence is not refusing but making them visible as they happen. Logging the request, estimating its impact in hours and reporting it at the next review turns a later argument about the invoice into a decision the client makes with the information in front of them. In most cases the client approves the extension.

Log of out-of-scope requests with impact estimate
Warning when agreed budget thresholds are reached
Traceability of who asked for what and who authorized it
Comparison between scope sold and work actually delivered

Planning resources when projects compete for the same people

In a portfolio of time-based projects the conflict is about people, not calendars. Optimizing each project separately produces owners who reserve capacity just in case and a firm with people formally busy and actually available, or the reverse.

Two rules solve most of it: allocation is decided in one place with a shared view, and every tentative booking carries a date on which it is either confirmed or released. Without the second rule, bookings extend by inertia and the bench arrives all at once when there is no room left to react commercially.

Visible distinction between confirmed and tentative allocation
Expiry date on every capacity reservation
Single view of availability by role and skill
Assignment end warning with enough lead time

IT consulting boutique, 8 PMs, 25 active projects

Each PM dedicated 1 day/week to internal and client reporting. With hice.ai: 1 hour/week. 7 hours/week × 8 PMs = 56 hours/week freed. In a year = an extra PM without hiring.

hice.ai vs Microsoft Project / Jira / Excel

Feature	hice.ai	MS Project + Jira + Excel
Per-role rates	Native	No (Jira/MS Project)
Project margin	Real-time	Manual Excel
Burn-rate alerts	Automatic	Hand calculations
Client reporting	Automatic	Manual
Billing integration	Yes	No
AI native	Yes	No