One record for the work, however you bill it.
Fixed fee, by the hour per project or per person, or not billed at all — the choice is per project, and it decides what the budget panel shows without changing anything about how the work itself is tracked.
Everything on the one record
Milestones, a task board, timesheets, files, discussions and a Gantt, each a tab on the same project — so nobody is hunting a second tool for the file a client just sent, or the hours somebody logged this morning.
Health, without reading every task
Progress and days left
Set by hand or worked out from milestones — the page says which, so nobody mistakes an estimate for a measurement.
Budget against spend
Logged time and rebilled costs against the budget, shown only to people the project allows to see money — a contractor can open the same project and see none of it.
Members see their own work; the customer sees theirs
A member sees the projects they are on. What the customer sees in their own portal — tasks, milestones, files, even hours logged — is a set of switches per project, so a firm decides that once, per client, rather than policing it screen by screen. The project’s data and files can be taken out in one go at any time; it is your record, not ours.