Core concepts

Projects & tasks

Projects organize work in TimerOS and bring together tracked time, budgets and what your clients see. Every plan can use projects, tasks and subtasks. Higher plans add team-level visibility and roles; the task structure is the same on all plans.

In the desktop and web apps, projects are on the Projects page (with a detail page for each project), and tasks have their own Tasks page. Your clients also see projects in the client portal, where they view active work, respond to proposals, and follow milestones, budget and files.

Structure: projects, tasks, subtasks, milestones

Inside a project you can split work into milestones, tasks and subtasks. In the client portal, each project opens in a set of tabs:

  • Overview: status timeline, figures for progress, milestones, budget and days remaining, plus an activity log.
  • Milestones / Structure: milestones, tasks and subtasks (the tab is called “Structure” for proposals and “Milestones” for active projects).
  • Budget: the client’s total budget, resource allocations, budget phases and payment milestones.
  • Discussion: notes the client can post and reply to (one level of replies).
  • Files: folders with upload, download, rename, delete and move.

Budgets

Each project tracks the client’s total budget, resource allocations, budget phases and payment milestones. Progress and budget figures appear on the project Overview, so you can compare what has been used with what was planned.

Tracked time

Only the desktop timer bar records time. It is stored per person and per day, hour by hour. Since v1.3 the Windows desktop app also matches that time to your open tasks and subtasks automatically (still marked Beta). The matching runs on your device and only the total seconds per task are synced; the tracked hours on tasks and subtasks then fill in by themselves. When no task is a clear match, the time stays productive and is not assigned to a task. You can review, reassign or remove any automatic assignment in the Task time panel on the Performance page, or turn the feature off in Settings → Activity Detection. Since v1.15.0 you can no longer type “actual hours” in by hand: a task’s hours come only from tracked time, and those are the hours the budget counts. For how each second is classified, see activity classification and time states.

Visibility & access

Project access follows your workspace roles and permissions. In the client portal, contacts see only the areas they have access to. To request a project, a contact needs edit permission on projects. To approve proposals, they need the separate approval permission.

Connected work
Project costs and revenue feed into billing & invoicing and, on Enterprise, into profit tracking that includes payroll. Summaries and exports are on the reports & performance pages.

Missing a project workflow you need? Check the roadmap to see whether it is planned.