In brief: Service Types are the specific kinds of work you do and carry rates; Service Groups are the parent buckets they roll up into for reporting.

Applies to: Owners and Admins manage the list. Everyone uses Service Types when planning, assigning, and logging time.

See also: Deliverable Types and Setting Your Primary Industry covers the other classification layer, Plan Stepper: How to Build a Job Plan Step by Step covers where types become effort pools, and Reading the Job Performance Tab: Plan, Actual, Drift covers how they come back to you.

You classify work in two layers. Service Types are the specific kinds of work you do, like Design or SEO, and they are what planning, tasks, time, and Performance all speak in. Service Groups are the parent buckets those types roll up into, like Creative or Build, and they exist so reporting stays readable. Every Service Type belongs to one group, and only Service Types carry rates.

You'll find it under Settings → Service Types.

Service Types: where work gets measured

A Service Type is one specific kind of work. It answers: what kind of work is this?

Most shops end up with something like:

• Design
• Development
• Project Management
• SEO
• Copywriting

Service Types are not a filing convenience. They are load-bearing, and they show up in five places:

• Planning. Level of effort pools on a deliverable are built per Service Type, which is most of the work in Plan Stepper: How to Build a Job Plan Step by Step.
• Deliverable pools. The effort you set aside for each kind of work on a deliverable. Deliverables: Status, Due Dates, and Confidence Explained covers what else a deliverable carries.
• Task assignments. A task carries a Service Type, which is how the work you do connects back to the work you planned. See Job Tasks: Assignees, Allocations, and Statuses.
• Time tracking. Logged effort inherits the Service Type from the task, so it follows you into My Time.
• Performance breakdowns. The service type mix on My Performance, and the breakdowns described in Reading the Job Performance Tab: Plan, Actual, Drift, are built from this.

This is why the list is worth a few minutes of thought when you set the workspace up. Everything downstream reads it.

What lives on a Service Type

When you add or edit one, you set:

• Name. What your team actually calls this work.
• Description. Optional, useful when two types sit close together.
• Service group. Which bucket it rolls up into.
• Billable. Whether this kind of work is billable, with a base rate when it is.

Service Groups: where reporting stays calm

A Service Group is a parent bucket that Service Types roll up into. Common ones:

• Strategy & Planning
• Creative
• Build
• Delivery Management
• Growth
• Support & Maintenance
• Internal

A Service Group has a name and a description. That is all it needs, because a group is an organizing device rather than a costing one.

Why groups exist at all

Agencies need detail at the execution level and calm at the reporting level. Those two needs pull in opposite directions.

At the task level you want precision. Design and Copywriting are genuinely different work done by different people. But a mature workspace ends up with a lot of Service Types, and a leader staring at a list of twenty micro-labels cannot see anything at all.

Groups let you say the useful sentence instead:

• Build is overrunning.
• Delivery Management is expanding.
• Creative is consuming more effort than we planned.

Same data. One reading is noise, the other is a decision. How those readings are calculated is the subject of How Performance Works: Effort, Timeline, and Drift.

The two rules to remember

Every Service Type belongs to one Service Group

One group, never two. That is what makes rollups add up: every hour of effort lands in exactly one bucket, so nothing is double counted and nothing goes missing.

A Service Type you have not filed yet sits under No group until you assign it. It still works everywhere, it just will not roll up cleanly in reporting, so it is worth tidying.

Service Types carry rates. Service Groups do not.

This is the sharp one, and it is the distinction most people get wrong at first.

A rate belongs to a specific kind of work. Design and Development are priced differently, and averaging them into a single "Creative" rate would quietly destroy the precision you set them up for.

So rates live on Service Types only. Service Groups have no rate field, and there is nowhere to put one. Pricing stays at the execution level. Grouping stays at the reporting level. Neither one contaminates the other.

Setting it up

The order that works:

1. Define your Service Groups first. Five to seven is plenty. These are the buckets you want to read your performance in.
2. Define Service Types inside them. As many as your work genuinely needs, named the way your team talks.
3. Use Service Types when planning and doing the work. Effort pools, tasks, time.
4. Use Service Groups when reading the results. Rollups, filters, and performance segments.

Precise at the task level. Calm at the top. That is the whole design. Running one set of categories through planning, time, and reporting is also what keeps you off a pile of disconnected apps, a habit we picked apart in the hidden costs of using too many workflow automation tools.

Who manages this

Service Types and Service Groups are Owner and Admin work, and you manage them in Settings → Service Types. User Roles Explained: Owner, Admin, Lead, and Member sets out who is who.

Everyone uses them. Leads and Members pick Service Types constantly while planning work, creating tasks, and logging time. They just do not manage the list itself.

When a Service Type falls out of use, retire it rather than reaching for delete. Historical reporting still needs to know what that work was called when it happened, which is the same reasoning behind Why Some Things Can't Be Deleted: Archive, Retire, Move.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a Service Type and a Service Group?

A Service Type is the specific kind of work, like Design or SEO. A Service Group is the bucket it rolls up into, like Creative or Build. Service Types are what you plan, assign, and log time against. Service Groups are what you read reporting in.

Can a Service Type belong to more than one Service Group?

No. Exactly one. That is what keeps rollups honest: every hour lands in one bucket, so nothing is counted twice and nothing goes missing.

Can I put a rate on a Service Group?

No. Rates live on Service Types only. A group covers several kinds of work priced differently, so a group-level rate would just be an average that hides the detail you set the types up to capture.

Who can add or edit Service Types?

Owners and Admins, in Settings → Service Types. Leads and Members use Service Types throughout the product but do not manage the list.

What happens if I do not put a Service Type in a group?

It works normally, but it sits under "No group" and will not roll up cleanly in reporting. Assign it to a group when you get a chance so your performance reads properly.

Should I delete a Service Type we no longer use?

Retire it instead of deleting it. Past Jobs, logged effort, and old reports still reference it, and reporting history needs to know what that work was called at the time.

How many Service Types should we have?

As many as your work genuinely differs, and no more. If two types are always planned together, assigned to the same people, and read the same way in reporting, they are probably one type.

Related articles

Deliverable Types and Setting Your Primary Industry covers the other classification layer, the one that describes what the client receives rather than the work your team does. Once your types are set, Plan Stepper: How to Build a Job Plan Step by Step is where they turn into effort pools, and Reading the Job Performance Tab: Plan, Actual, Drift is where that effort comes back to you as a service type breakdown. For the same cut across the whole workspace rather than one Job, use the Time Report: See Every Time Entry Your Team Logged.

Updated on: 08/04/2026