Projects and tasks

A project is one job with a beginning and an end. Everything about it lives on one page: the tasks, the dates, the people working on it, the files, the money and the history of what changed.

Creating a project

1. Go to Work then Projects.
2. Click New project in the top right.
3. Fill in the form, covered below.
4. Click Create project.

The card appears on your projects list straight away.

Name and description

Name is what you and everyone else will scan for, so make it specific. "Website redesign for Acme Co." beats "Redesign". The Description is optional and shows as two lines on the project card.

Currency

Set once, at the top of the form. It is the currency every rate, budget and invoice on this project uses. It defaults to the currency on your account.

Client project

Turn on Client project when the work is for someone who should be able to see it and be billed for it. You then pick the Client contact, which is a person already in your contacts.

Turning this on unlocks two things: invoicing from tracked time, and the client portal. See working with clients.

Billable

Turn on Billable to track hours against a rate. A Default rate field appears, priced per hour in the project's currency.

The default rate is the fallback. A team member can carry their own rate on this project, and a single task can override both, so a project where design bills differently to production needs no second project.

Budget

Three choices:

• No budget if you are not tracking a ceiling.
• By hours if the deal is a number of hours. You then set Budget hours.
• By amount if the deal is a fixed fee. You then set Budget amount.

Whichever you pick, the project page and the reports page show how much of it you have burned through.

Start and due date

Both optional. The due date shows on the project card and, along with task due dates and milestone dates, on the calendar view.

The projects list

Work then Projects shows every project as a card with its status, its task count and progress bar, how many members are on it, and its due date. A client project carries a Client badge.

• The search box filters by name and description as you type.
• The status filter takes All statuses, Active, On hold, Completed and Archived.
• Archived projects are hidden unless you filter for them specifically, so archiving is how you clear the decks without losing anything.

The project page

Open a project and you get a row of tabs. Each one is covered below.

Overview: ask the project a question

The overview is a question box. Ask something in plain language and you get an answer built only from the files in this project, with each statement pointing back at the document and the page it came from.

Four suggested questions sit under the box to get you started:

• Build me a timeline of what happened
• List every date and deadline in these files
• What has been decided so far?
• Who is involved, and what is each person's role?

Two things are worth knowing about the answers. Any statement whose source cannot be confirmed against a real page of a real document is removed rather than shown, so an answer is often shorter than you expect. And nothing outside this project is ever read, not even another project you also have access to.

If the project has no files yet, the box tells you so and points you at the Files tab. Answering a question uses credits from your account, and the amount used is shown under each answer.

Files

Every project has its own set of pages and documents. You write notes as pages, nest them under each other, and drop files in to be read and searched.

This is the same tree and the same editor as the knowledge base, with one important difference: a project's files are never listed alongside your other spaces, and they follow the project's own access rather than being shared page by page. Instead of a share control, each page tells you who can see it.

Tasks

The Tasks tab draws the same tasks three ways. Pick a view with the buttons at the top left:

• Board puts tasks in columns you define, and you drag cards between them.
• List is a table with the task, status, assignee, priority and due date.
• Calendar groups tasks and milestones by the day they are due.

Your choice is remembered, so if you think in lists you will not be shown a board again.

The filters beside the view buttons apply to all three: status, assignee, priority, label and milestone. On the calendar, filtering by anything task-specific hides milestones, because a milestone has no assignee or priority and leaving it in would look like the filter had missed.

Each board column shows how many tasks it holds. If you have set a limit for that column, the count turns red once it goes over.

Adding a task

Click Add task at the bottom of a board column, or New task on the Tasks tab. The dialog asks for:

• Title and an optional Description
• The column it starts in
• Assignee, or leave it Unassigned
• Priority: none, low, medium, high or urgent
• Due date
• Milestone, or no milestone
• Billable, which starts on if the project itself is billable

Working on a task

Click any task, in any view, and it opens in a panel beside the board. Everything in it saves as you change it:

• Title, Description, Assignee, Priority, Due date and Milestone.
• Billable and a Task rate, which overrides the project and member rates for hours logged against this one task.
• Custom fields you have defined for tasks. See labels and custom fields.
• Labels, added from your shared label list.
• A Checklist for the small steps inside the task. Type an item and press Enter.
• Subtasks, which are real tasks nested under this one.
• Depends on, naming the task that has to happen first.
• Attachments. Click Upload file to add one.
• Comments, which is also where a client's comments land if you have given them permission to leave them.

Deleting a task removes it and its checklist for good.

Milestones

Milestones are the handful of dates you would actually put in a calendar: delivery, approval, launch. Click New milestone, give it a name, an optional description and a due date.

Each milestone shows as complete or not. Click Complete when it lands. Editing and deleting are on the same row, and deleting a milestone leaves its tasks alone: they simply stop belonging to a milestone.

Milestones show up on the calendar view alongside task due dates, and on the report your client sees.

Money

The Money tab is three numbers and a list:

• Tracked is every hour logged against this project.
• Billable is the part of that marked billable.
• Unbilled is billable time that has not been put on an invoice yet, which is exactly what a new invoice would draw from.

Under those, a bar shows how much of your budget is gone, in hours or in money depending on which kind of budget you set. Under that sits every invoice raised for this project, each one clickable through to Finance.

On a client project a New invoice button turns that unbilled time into a draft invoice. The full walkthrough is in time tracking.

Activity

A running history of what has happened on the project, newest first, a page at a time. This is where you go to answer "when was that deadline moved" and "who changed the status".

Settings

Everything you set when you created the project, plus a few things you could not:

General holds the name, the status (Active, On hold, Completed, Archived), the currency and the start and due dates.

Board columns is where your board is defined. Add a column with a name and a kind, reorder them with the arrows, and set a limit on how many tasks a column should hold. A column has to be empty before it can be deleted.

Members lists everyone working on the project, with their role and their hourly rate on this project. Add a member from your team and give them a rate in the same step. Removing someone here takes them off the project, not off your team.

Billing and budget repeats the client, billable, rate and budget controls from the create form, and adds Budget alert at %, which is the point at which reports start flagging the project as running hot.

Identity lists the project's own details followed by any custom fields you have defined for projects. A field with no value is left out.

Danger zone holds Archive project, which takes it off the active list without deleting anything.