Projects now copy and close themselves – plus 30 more updates

33 updates in September: projects copy and close themselves, invoices go to multiple recipients, and bank matching handles bulk payments and skonto. Important for admins: project permissions no longer open up financial data.

In September we closed 33 tickets. Projects now extend and close themselves, invoices go to as many recipients as you like, and the bank integration also recognises collective transfers. Two changes affect existing settings – that is why they come first.

Please note

• Project permissions no longer open up financial data: Until now, anyone who could read a project also saw its invoices, credit notes, offers, expenses and timesheets. These project tabs now require the same permission as the corresponding overview page of the organisation, and a project's automatic invoicing can only be changed with the permission “Edit outgoing invoices”. If a project manager is now missing a tab, please add the matching permission in the user permissions. Read the blog post: Every tab now needs its own permission
• Auto-Close is active for existing projects as well: Projects are now closed automatically 30 days after their end date. If a project should stay open longer, adjust the period in the project form or switch Auto-Close off there.

Auto-Copy and Auto-Close: projects that manage themselves

Auto-Copy creates the follow-up project automatically one day after a project ends – with members, billing rates, activities, approvers and freshly reset budgets. You build the new identifier from placeholders such as <YYYY>-<Quarter>, so 2026-Q3-PRIVACY becomes 2026-Q4-PRIVACY. You set up the quarterly extension once instead of four times a year.
Auto-Close closes finished projects after a configurable period and keeps your project list tidy.
Read the blog post: Projects that extend themselves and clean up after themselves

Multiple recipients for offers, invoices and dunning letters

You can now store any number of email addresses for offers, invoices and payment reminders – as a default on the project or directly on the individual invoice or offer. If you like, the main recipient appears with name and position in the address field of the PDF; everyone else receives a copy in CC. The offer form has been rebuilt for this and now works like the invoice form.
Read the blog post: Multiple recipients

Bank integration and accounting

• One transfer, several invoices: If a customer pays several invoices with a single transfer, ZEIT.IO reads the invoice numbers from the payment reference and matches all documents automatically – but only if every number fits and the total is correct to the cent. Read the blog post: One Transfer, Four Invoices
• Skonto on credit notes: If a credit note is paid with a deduction within the skonto period, the bank reconciliation now recognises the payment and marks the transaction as resolved. The credit note overview shows the skonto amount directly, and the CSV export has the new columns “With Skonto” and “Sum paid”. Read the blog post: Making Skonto visible
• Incoming invoices for expense submissions: Where the credit note procedure is not possible, an incoming invoice can now also be assigned to an approved expense submission – until now this only worked for timesheets. Supplier and amounts are prefilled, and double payments are prevented. Read the blog post: When an invoice arrives after all
• Non-billable hours as an attachment: Auto-invoices, such as a monthly maintenance flat fee, can optionally attach a second timesheet with all non-billable hours of the period – in the PDF and in the XRechnung. That way your customer sees the work behind the flat fee. Read the blog post: Non-billable hours as an optional timesheet
• Amount already paid in dunning letters: The email templates for invoices and dunning letters support the new variable %{paid_amount}. For partially paid invoices you can now state both the amount already paid and the amount still outstanding.

Projects and contracts

• Closing a project: look first, then close: Instead of an “Are you sure?” dialog, ZEIT.IO now shows a dedicated page when you close a project, listing all consequences and every open time record, timesheet and expense. Timesheets and expenses can no longer be submitted on closed projects. Read the blog post: Look first, then shut the door
• Import supplier contracts from CSV: Twenty new freelancers on the project? Instead of filling in the form twenty times, upload one CSV file – in the same format as the export. The contracts are created as drafts, and duplicates are detected. For integrations there is the new API endpoint POST /api/v1/org/contracts/suppliers. Read the blog post: Import supplier contracts from CSV
• New bank account for running contracts: Credit notes use the bank account of the contract, not the one of your account. When you as a freelancer add a new account or make it your default, ZEIT.IO now shows all active contracts and asks whether the new account should be used for them. Read the blog post: New Account, Old Credit Note
• Overview of all fixed-price packages: A new list shows all fixed-price packages of the organisation with purchase and sale price, margin, deadline and status – filterable, with totals and CSV export. You see at a glance which packages are due but not yet submitted for approval. The menu entry can be switched on in the organisation settings.

Time tracking, expenses and team

• Cancellation with notification: When an approved timesheet or expense submission is cancelled, the freelancer, the submitter and all approvers now receive an email with the reason. The cancellation page also points out that the reason is visible to everyone as a comment. Read the blog post: Who reads the reason – and who hears about it
• Time records always visible on timesheets: The table with the individual time records now always appears, even if the timesheet was grouped by people, activities or projects before. No more clicking “Show details”.
• The right date when catching up: If you browse back to an earlier day in the daily view and then open “Capture time”, that day is now preselected instead of today.
• New expense filters: Expense submissions can now be filtered by user category, such as employees or suppliers, just like expenses. There is also a filter for draft expenses. And the expense submission overview loads noticeably faster.
• CSV export of users: The user list of an organisation can now be exported as CSV, with all membership fields.

Security

We spent a large part of the month on a comprehensive security review of ZEIT.IO and fixed the issues we found. Among other things, permissions are now checked more strictly throughout, a 2FA code can no longer be used twice, live connections in the browser are additionally secured, and passwords are automatically moved to a stronger hashing method at your next login. You don't need to do anything.

Bug fixes

• The CSV import for projects did not respond after uploading.
• Copying a project lost the customer name.
• An incoming invoice assigned to an expense submission did not appear on the invoice page of the individual expenses.