Setting Up Your first project
A Project is the top-most layer of time-tracking and planning. All time entries are tracked within a project, and all tasks live within a project too. All projects are sub-divided into categories (the kind of work), and can belong to a client (the organization or individual that the project belongs to).
When building your first project, you should first define the building blocks it depends on: categories and clients, and also optionally tags and capacity types. Once these are done, you can create the project, select the appropriate categories and assign personnel.
Categories
Categories are the work types that time is tracked against. They appear on every time entry and every project. Categories are established globally across your organization so that work can be tracked across projects. They act as templates for your project — when you add a category to a project, it inherits the global template's settings.
Create at least one global category before creating a project. You cannot track time on a project without at least one category.
Clients
Clients represent an organization or individual that "owns" the Project. This could be your organization if the project is internal, or someone you are doing work for. Client association is required for projects when billing is needed, but are not otherwise required. A Client can have an unlimited number of projects associated with it, unless your subscription otherwise limits this.
It doesn't really matter if you create the client after the project and then link them, but it saves a couple of steps.
Tags (optional)
Tags are labels you can attach to users, projects, clients, categories, time entries, and Time Flow tasks.
Remember that a tag only appears when its scope includes that entity type. For example, a tag with only the Projects scope enabled appears when tagging a project but not when tagging a time entry.
Define your tags before creating projects and categories so they are available for assignment from the start.
Capacity Types (optional)
Capacity Types define categories of work capacity — for example, Design, Development, or Marketing. They are used to match users to tasks and categories based on skill set.
Capacity types are only available when Capacity Planning is enabled in Settings > Organization > Time Flow. If you do not see this page, enable Capacity Planning first.
Creating a Project
With building blocks in place, navigate to Settings > Projects and create a new project (see Managing Projects).
All Personnel vs Assigned Personnel
All Personnel means every active user in your organization can track time against this project. This is the simplest setup and works well for small teams or internal projects where everyone participates.
Assigned Personnel restricts the project to specific users. Only users you explicitly assign can see and track time against it. Choose this when different teams work on different projects and should not see each other's work.
Project Categories
After creating the project, add categories from the project settings. Each project category is based on a global category template and inherits its rate, cost, billable flag, and state.
Locked global categories enforce consistency. When a global category is locked, project-level billable and rate settings cannot be overridden. Use this to ensure billing rates are uniform across projects.
Project Personnel
This section is only relevant for projects set to Assigned Personnel.
Open the project's personnel tab. The interface shows two columns: available users from your organization and users assigned to the project. Click a user to move them between columns. Click Save to apply. Only active users appear in the available list.
Kanban Stages
If Time Flow is enabled, you can define stages for the project's Flow Board. Two sections are available:
Backlog Stages — stages for work that is tracked but not actively in progress.
Doing Stages — stages for work currently in progress.
Each stage has a name and a position. Use the up and down arrows to reorder, or click the remove button to delete. Click Add Stage to create a new one. Stages with empty names are automatically removed on save.
Kanban stages are only available when Enable Stages is turned on in Settings > Organization > Time Flow.
General Tips
A project should encompass a single deliverable, within the same general scope of work. If you were developing a website and promotional campaign for a client, for instance, it would be better to separate these into distinct projects attached to the client.
What to Avoid
Creating a project without categories. Every time entry requires a category. Without one, entries fall into an uncategorized state that is difficult to report on or bill.
Skipping client assignment. If you plan to bill for time, assign a client when creating the project. Retrofitting a client later means revisiting project settings before generating an invoice.
Ignoring task prefix and stub. The task prefix and stub lock once tasks are created. Choose them deliberately — they appear on every task ID and in every URL.