Projects & the Workspace
A project is the top-level container for a job: it carries the customer, the schedule, the budget, the team, the documents, and the money. Everything else in the module hangs off a project.
The dashboard
/project opens the portfolio dashboard — a read-at-a-glance view across all projects:
- Summary cards — counts of total, active (In Progress), on-hold, and completed projects.
- Status chart — projects broken down by status.
- Budget chart — planned vs. actual spend across the portfolio.
- Active projects — your most recently active jobs with manager, priority, and a progress bar; click through to open one.
- Upcoming milestones — the next deliverables and how many days out they are.
- Resource utilization — who is allocated and how heavily.
- Recent activity — a running feed of changes across projects.
The projects list
/project/list is the full, filterable table of projects. Each row shows the project number, name, status, type, priority, progress, customer, manager, dates, budget, and task counts. From here you can:
- Filter by status, type, priority, billing method, billable flag, customer, manager, department, and date ranges.
- Search across name, number, and customer.
- Create a new project, copy an existing one, edit, delete, or open it.
Creating a project
Click New Project and fill in the form. The important fields:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name | Required. The project gets an auto-generated project number (doc number) on save. |
| Code | Optional short reference. |
| Type | How the job is run/billed — see below. |
| Status | Starts at Draft. |
| Priority | Low / Medium / High / Critical. |
| Billable | Whether the project's time and costs are billable to the customer. |
| Billing method | Hourly, Fixed Price, Milestone, or Progress Billing. |
| Start / End date | Planned timeline. |
| Budget amount | Top-line budget figure (the detailed budget lives in the Budget tab). |
| Customer | The client the work is for. |
| Project manager | The lead responsible for the job. |
| Department / Location | Internal ownership and where the work happens. |
Project types
| Type | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Time & Materials | Bill by hours and materials consumed. (Default.) |
| Fixed Price | A flat fee for the agreed scope. |
| Internal | Non-billable internal work. |
| Retainer | Recurring/retained engagement. |
Project statuses
Projects move through a lifecycle. Each status has a consistent color across the app:
| Status | Color | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Draft | gray | Just created, not yet planned. |
| Planning | cyan | Scoping, scheduling, and budgeting. |
| In Progress | blue | Active execution. |
| On Hold | orange | Temporarily paused. |
| Completed | green | Finished. |
| Cancelled | red | Terminated. |
Defaults you can set. Under your company/user settings the module lets you preset the default project type, priority, billable flag, and billing method for new projects, plus how tasks are grouped by default — so new projects start pre-configured the way your team works.
The Overview tab
Opening a project lands you on Overview — the project's cover page. The header shows the name, project number, and color pills for status, type, and priority, with an actions menu to edit, change status, archive, copy, or delete.
Below the header:
- Project info & metrics — customer, manager, dates, budget, overall progress %, task counts, and estimated vs. actual hours.
- Mini-Kanban — a compact preview of how tasks are distributed across columns, with a link to the full board in the Work tab.
- Upcoming deadlines — the next tasks due, with overdue ones flagged red.
- Milestones — the project's key deliverables (see below).
Milestones
Milestones are the significant checkpoints in a project — a phase sign-off, a delivery date, or a billing trigger. Each milestone has a name, a target date, an optional billing amount, and a status:
| Milestone status | Color | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Pending | blue | Not yet reached. |
| Achieved | green | Hit — records the actual date. |
| Missed | red | Target date passed without completion. |
| Cancelled | gray | No longer relevant. |
From the Overview tab you can add, edit, delete, or mark a milestone achieved (which stamps the actual date). On milestone-billed projects, the milestone's amount drives what gets invoiced when it's achieved.
Milestones can also be represented as a task of type Milestone when you want them to live on the Gantt with dependencies and assignees. See Tasks & the Work Tab.
Smart status prompts
The workspace nudges you to keep status honest instead of letting it drift:
- When the first task starts, it offers to move the project to In Progress.
- When all tasks are done, it offers to mark the project Completed.
- When the project is past its end date with open work, it shows an overdue banner.
You confirm the change — the project never silently flips status on you.
Project templates
If you run the same kind of job repeatedly, save the setup once and reuse it. A project template captures a full skeleton — phases, tasks (with relative dates and dependencies), milestones, and budget lines — and a default duration.
- Create a template from scratch, or turn an existing project into a template to capture a structure that already works.
- Create a project from a template: pick the template, give the new project a name and start date, and assign the customer, manager, department, and location. The module clones the whole structure and recalculates every date from your chosen start date, so the schedule lands ready to run.
Copying a project
Need a near-duplicate without a template? Copy an existing project from the list — it carries over the descriptive fields (name, dates, budget, type) while resetting the identity fields (new project number, Draft status, fresh timestamps).