Projects

A customer's work, in one place: its status, its dates, its budget, who is on it, and — hanging off it — its milestones, tasks, time, files and the rest.

When you would use this: for anything that is more than a single invoice or a single conversation — a piece of work with a start, a deadline and people doing it.

The list: every project you may see, with counts by status, deadlines coming up, and — for a reader who may see money — budget against what has actually been logged. A reader who may not see money gets the same list with an hours view instead of a budget one; a project the reader is not on, when their role is scoped to their own, does not appear at all.

Starting one: a customer, a name, a status, a start and deadline date, and a billing method — Fixed fee, Project hours (billed on time logged against the project as a whole) or Task hours (billed on time logged against its individual tasks). The currency is the customer's own, copied in at creation and fixed for the life of the project. A budget and a default hourly rate are optional and, once set, editable only by a reader who may see money.

What is inside a project: tabs across the top — Overview, Milestones, Tasks, Time, Files, Discussions, a Gantt timeline, and, where the modules apply, Estimates, Proposals and Invoices scoped to this one customer's work, plus Notes and an Activity feed of who did what. Each behaves the same as its own standalone screen, narrowed to this project.

Milestones: the stages of the project, in order, each with its own dates and — for a reader who may see money — an amount and whether it is billable. Completing one records who finished it and when. A project's overall progress is either set by hand or, if the project is set to compute it from milestones, worked out from how many are complete — never both at once. A completed, billable milestone that has not yet been invoiced can be turned into an invoice directly from here, for a reader who may also write invoices.

Letting the customer in: a project can be made visible in the client portal at all, and, separately, whether the customer may see time logged against it, view or create tasks, comment on tasks, see the finances, see the activity feed, see milestones, and upload their own files — each its own switch, so a customer can watch progress without ever seeing what it costs.

Changing status or archiving: status moves between Not started, In progress, On hold, Cancelled and Finished by hand, whenever the work actually changes state — nothing here is derived. Archiving takes a project out of the default list without deleting it; there is deliberately no delete, because a project may be the parent of time that has already been invoiced. "Copy" starts a fresh project with the same shape, against the customer you choose, for repeat work.

A narrower view: a Contractor sees only the projects they are a member of, and never a customer list, a budget or anything else about money — their list and their Overview tab show hours, not amounts. Other roles read every project or none, depending on what they hold.

When it refuses: no Projects item in your menu means your firm has not switched projects on, or you lack the permission — ask an Owner or Admin. "Add a customer first" on New project means exactly that — a project belongs to a company.