Projects
Projects, tasks, milestones, timesheets and the billing that comes out of them.
The short version
For anyone who sells work rather than goods, the project is the product. Three questions matter and they are all the same question: what did it cost, how late is it, and did it make money. Businesses that answer these at the year end are answering them too late to act.
Projects
A budget, a customer, an owner and a status, on a list or a board. Budget against actual updates as timesheets and vendor bills land, rather than being assembled when the job closes.
Tasks and milestones
Assigned, dated and dependent on each other, so a slip is visible while there is still time to move something. A milestone can gate a stage or trigger a bill.
Timesheets
Recorded against tasks and marked billable or not. The hours nobody wrote down are the hours nobody was paid for, which is the single most common leak in a services business.
Teams, including outsiders
Teams mix your staff with the client’s people and outside vendors. Nicknames and confidentiality let a collaborator see the work without seeing whose it is — useful when a freelancer is on three of your projects and two of them are for competitors.
Unbilled time becomes an invoice
Time recorded against a project turns into invoice lines directly. Nobody re-adds hours in a spreadsheet on the last Friday of the month, and nothing is quietly dropped because it was too small to bother with.
Budget against actual, while it still matters
Spent versus budgeted, live. A project going over is a thing you find out in week three, not at handover.
How this compares
A project tool with no money in it
Excellent at tasks, blind to cost. It can tell you the work is late but not that it is unprofitable, and the invoice still gets built somewhere else from hours retyped by hand.
A spreadsheet per project
Perfectly good for one project. The failure is in aggregate: nobody can say which of the eleven live jobs is losing money without opening eleven files, so nobody does.
Questions people ask
Can a client see their own project?
Does it do retainers?
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A company file store where sharing is inherited and nothing leaks by accident.
See it with your own data
Start free, import a spreadsheet of your customers, and raise a real GST invoice in the first ten minutes. No card, no sales call.