Projects

Project Planning

Gantt View

Switch to Gantt view in any project. Tasks are displayed as bars on a timeline.

• Drag task bars to reschedule start/end dates.
• Zoom to Day, Week, Month, Quarter.
• Dependencies – Link tasks. A task cannot start until its predecessor is done.
• Critical Path – Auto-highlighted if enabled.
• Group By – Assignee, Stage, Milestone.

Milestones

Go to Projects > Milestones. Create key deliverables:

• Name, date, project.
• Allow task creation directly from milestone.
• Milestones appear in Gantt view as diamonds.
• If the project bills by milestone, reaching one can trigger an invoice automatically.

Resource Planning

With the Planning module installed, you can:

• Assign specific time slots to employees per task.
• View resource availability in the Planning view — booked hours vs an employee's working schedule.
• Avoid over-allocation: the view flags an employee scheduled for more hours than they have available that week.
• Publish the plan so employees see their own upcoming slots on their personal dashboard.

Project Reporting

Project Analysis

Go to Projects > Reporting > Project Analysis. Pivot with:

• Dimensions: Project, Task, Assignee, Stage, Customer, Milestone.
• Measures: Number of Tasks, Task Done, Planned Hours, Timesheet Hours, Delay (days).

Timesheet Analysis

Go to Projects > Reporting > Timesheet Analysis. See hours logged by employee, project, task, and date. Track billable vs non-billable hours. Calculate utilization rate (billable hours ÷ total hours available).

Profitability

For billable projects, Projects > Reporting > Profitability compares invoiced revenue against timesheet cost (hours × employee cost) and any purchase/expense costs booked to the project's analytic account — the single clearest view of whether a project actually made money.

Project Dashboard

Go to Projects > Dashboard. Overview of all active projects:

• Tasks count per stage (like a mini-kanban).
• Overdue task count.
• Timesheet summary.
• Progress bar (tasks done / total tasks).

Best Practices

• Use tags consistently across projects for cross-project reporting.
• Keep the number of open tasks per assignee under a reasonable limit.
• Review Gantt dependencies weekly.
• Track planned vs actual hours to improve estimation on future quotes.

Giving Customers Visibility

Set a project's Privacy to Portal and link a Customer on individual tasks to let that contact log into the portal and see:

• Task status and stage (read-only, or commentable if you allow it).
• Attached files and the task description.
• Milestone progress on the overall project.

Internal notes and internal-only discussion messages stay hidden from portal users — only messages explicitly sent "to customer" (or logged as a note vs a message, depending on configuration) become visible, so internal team debate about a task never leaks to the client by accident.

This is commonly combined with Milestones billing so the customer's portal view doubles as a plain-language project status page they can check anytime instead of emailing "any updates?".