Milestone billing explained

Milestone billing lets you break a fixed-price project into stages, so you invoice as work is delivered instead of waiting until the whole project is done.

A milestone represents a chunk of work with:

A name and description of what's being delivered.
Estimated start and end dates, so it shows up on your project roadmap.
A status that tracks its progress from not started through to paid.
The people allocated to it and their hours — which is where its budget comes from.
Optionally, a list of deliverables attached to it.

Milestones are budgets. The billing plan is the price.

This is the part worth understanding, because the two are easy to confuse.

A milestone answers "what are we doing, when, and roughly what will it cost us to do it?" Its budget is worked out for you from the hours you allocate to it multiplied by those people's cost rates. You don't type a milestone price in — there's no Amount field on a milestone.
The billing plan answers "what will the client actually be invoiced, and when?" That's where the money lives.

So a milestone tells you what a stage costs you. The billing plan tells you what it earns you. Keeping them apart is what lets Handl show you a real margin instead of comparing a number to itself.

Where a project's value comes from

Project Settings shows two figures side by side when they differ, rather than quietly picking one:

Total Value — the contract value you entered yourself.
Billing plan value — the sum of the project's one-off billing items. This is the authoritative "what we will invoice" figure.

Seeing them disagree is useful, not a bug: it usually means the plan hasn't been built out yet, or the scope moved and the contract figure is stale.

Good to know

Milestone billing is used on Fixed Price projects. Time & Materials and Retainer projects bill differently (see "Recurring and time & materials billing" and "Retainers: automatic invoicing and overage billing").
Completing a milestone doesn't create an invoice on its own — you invoice a completed milestone with a deliberate action (see "Milestone statuses and what triggers invoicing").
A milestone's derived budget is a cost figure, so it only appears for people whose role can see cost data. If you can't see it, that's your permissions, not a missing budget.
Billing plan values are shown per currency and never added together across currencies. A project billed partly in USD and partly in AUD shows both lines.
A recurring billing item is a rate — "$4,500 / month" — not a lump sum, so it's listed separately from the one-off total rather than folded into it.
A project with no billing plan yet reads as unscheduled, not as $0.

FAQs

Where did the milestone Amount field go?
It was removed. Milestones used to carry their own price, which meant a project's value could be described in two places that disagreed. The price now lives in the billing plan, and the milestone carries the budget derived from its allocated hours.

Do I have to use milestones for every project?
No — only Fixed Price projects use them. Choose Time & Materials or Retainer if that fits the engagement better.

How do I change what a milestone will bill?
Edit the billing plan item, not the milestone. If a milestone should trigger an invoice when it completes, link it to a billing item in the Billing Plan tab.

Why doesn't my Total Value match the billing plan?
They're different things and both are shown. Total Value is what you typed when the project was set up; the billing plan is what's actually scheduled to be invoiced. If the plan is complete and correct, treat it as the real number.

Can I still see what a milestone is worth?
You can see what it's budgeted to cost, from its allocations. What it bills is whatever billing items are linked to it.