Variable rate per hours?

We are using the following billing method for our projects: Based on Staff Hours.

The reason is simple we have many users, and they all have a different rate per hour cost to the customer and, they all have a different cost for us.

This work great most of the time but we ran into an issue. We as a company during certain work we use specialize equipment. When such equipment is use (depending on which one) we charge a little bit more.

For example, is User A rate per hour is 100$ when he uses a certain equipment it would be 125$.

The users have no idea how much we charge the customer so the rate per hour is hidden.

We made a custom field inside the timesheet layout with a drop down and they can select the equipment they used.

We used to charge the customer using a third-party software so I would made an entire report in Zoho Analytics, and I would add the amount for that time log entry. This was super easy and convenient.

Now the customer is moving to Zoho Books, and we have the integration but no way from inside Zoho Books to see that field or add that amount to it.

What I look to do was a workflow rule in projects, but you can’t have workflow rules in projects base on time log entry.

Even if we could I ran into another issue if you use the API you can’t update the rate per hour for that time entry only you can only change the cost_per_hour.

The same is true for zoho.projects.updateAssociateLogs so it doesn’t help.

We can’t do Based on Task/Issue Hours because each employee as a different rate so that would not work.

We investigated using resources and assigning them, but you can’t do time entry for resources so not working either.

The only thing I am looking into would be to that a client account for each equipment and have the user make a time entry for them + the client that would be the equipment. This is not great as on the bill it would show as a separated line and the customer could ask questions. Also having user make multiple time entry for 1 time entry is kind of troublesome.

This is where I am with this and looking into any insight you guys could provide. This is driving me nuts.

Thanks

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