Projects Overview

A project is a container. It holds multiple jobs for the same client in one place, under one set of contacts, one quote and, if you want it, one contract and one invoice.

Most bookings don't need one. A single event on a single date is one job, and a job handles that on its own. Projects earn their place when the same client books you more than once and wants to deal with the whole run as one arrangement.

Take a venue that has you in every Monday for 7 weeks. Or a client running something across 4 days with a different setup each day. Or a touring client moving between cities. Each date is still its own job with its own timings, equipment and staff assigned to it. What the client doesn't want is 7 contracts, 7 invoices and 7 separate conversations. A project gives them one of each.

What sits at project level

Open a project and you get the project name, a project ID and a status in the header, then a row of tabs underneath.

The timeline tab gives you a Gantt view of every job in the project, one row per job. You can change the scale and zoom in and out, which makes it easy to see the shape of a booking that runs across weeks or months and to spot gaps or clashes without opening each job.

The quote tab is where the money sits. Every job is listed with its date, its status and its own subtotal, tax and total, and the whole project totals up underneath. There's a copy link button, so the client gets one link covering everything you've quoted rather than 7 separate quotes they have to read in sequence.

Details, files, tasks, activity and data all work the way they do elsewhere, applied to the project rather than to any one job inside it.

Contacts sit in the panel on the right. You set a primary contact and add as many others as you need, which matters because the person signing the contract is often not the person you deal with on the day.

Creating a project

You can build one from scratch or group jobs you already have.

Building from scratch suits the bookings where you know the shape up front. The client has told you they want 7 dates, so you create the project and add the jobs to it.

Grouping works after the fact. If a client has booked 3 separate jobs over the past few weeks and then asks you to put it all on one invoice, you don't have to rebuild anything. Pull the existing jobs into a project and they carry on as they are, now under one umbrella.

Grouping is the route most people end up using, because bookings rarely arrive in a tidy batch.

Leads and confirming

Jobs added to a project start out as leads. A banner at the top of the project tells you how many are still unconfirmed and gives you a confirm button.

That lets you build a full multi-date proposal and quote the client for all of it without any of those dates counting as confirmed business. When the client says yes, you confirm from the banner and the jobs move through together.

Payments

You can take payment against the project as a whole, so the client pays one amount covering every job in it. That's the normal setup for a venue contract or a corporate account.

Or you can split it, so each job is paid separately by whoever is responsible for that date. The jobs still sit under the same project, still share the same contract and still report together. Only the money is separated.

When to use a project

Use one when the client wants a single contract or a single invoice across several jobs, or when a run of dates needs to be managed and reported on as one arrangement rather than a pile of unrelated bookings.

Don't use one for a single job that happens to involve several items or several staff. That's still one job. And don't use one just because a client has booked you twice in a year with nothing connecting the two bookings.