Overview

A project is a piece of work you are selling or doing. It is the spine of the product: time is tracked against it, trips are attached to it, invoices are built from it, and the pipeline is made of them.

What a project holds

• A title and description, which is what you see everywhere else.
• The organizations involved, each in a role. Usually one client, sometimes an agency in between.
• A primary contact, the person you actually talk to.
• A stage in your pipeline, which you configure.
• Rates and terms, which decide what tracked hours are worth.
• Assigned people, when you work in a team.
• Skills, a source, a probability and an estimated value, for the ones you are still chasing.

Stage versus status

Two different things, easy to confuse.

The stage is where a project sits in your pipeline: lead, in discussion, proposal, and so on. You design those yourself under Settings, Pipeline.

Whether a project is open, won, lost, on hold or archived is a different axis. A project can be closed as lost from any stage, and archiving is not a stage at all.

Why archiving matters more than it looks

It moves to your archive and stops counting toward your plan limit. You can restore it anytime.

Archiving is the pressure valve on plan limits. Old finished work does not have to be deleted to stop counting; it can be archived and restored later.

Where to go next

• The list and the board, which are two views of the same thing
• Attention warnings, which is the feature that makes the board worth opening every morning