Projects: the job board, from won deal to client portal

A job isn't done when it's sold. The projects module is where the sold work becomes scheduled, staffed, costed and finally billed — the spine of the workspace for anyone who builds, fixes or delivers.

The board

Projects run on kanban boards with columns your workspace defines. Tasks carry assignees, priorities and custom fields; milestones mark the big rocks; and finish-to-start dependencies are enforced — a blocked task refuses to move forward, and creation refuses to build a dependency cycle, because a project tracker that permits circular logic isn't tracking anything. There's a Gantt view for the timeline people, with drag-to-resize bars and dependency arrows drawn honestly — including the red ones for open blockers. A my-work view answers "what's mine today" without wading through everyone else's cards.

The money view

Here's the part most project tools fake. The budget line on a project rolls up real costs: purchase orders awarded through the acquisition module for this project, labor time your team logged, plus your own manual cost entry — against a budget you set. And the change orders are billing documents, not sticky notes: an estimate attached to the project, sent to the client, accepted or declined on a public page, and when accepted, the approved total amends the budget. Scope changed, price changed, budget knows.

Billing rides the same rails: progress draws and deposits come from the invoicing module, client-ready. Time entries can flow to invoices at your billable rate — project rate or workspace default — stamped so nothing double-bills.

The daily log

Field teams know this document: what happened today, who was on site, what equipment ran, what the weather did, photos of the work. It's a first-class record here — one log per day per project, crew and equipment pulled from your workforce and asset records, photos attached and visible to the people who need them.

The client portal

And the part customers feel: a private, token-gated portal page per project. Your client sees milestones, accepted change orders, their invoices with pay links, and the latest site photos — without an account, without asking you for a status update. Deliberately invisible on that page: your costs, your margins, your internal notes. The portal shows the project's face, not its books.

Project templates and scheduled recurring projects handle the repeatable shapes — the quarterly inspection doesn't need rebuilding every quarter. The budget line carries real numbers rather than vibes: what's been spent through purchasing, what's been logged in labor, what remains against what you quoted. Milestones give clients and crew the same map, and the my-work view keeps each person's day answerable in one glance.

One workflow worth knowing cold: the client approves a change order on the public page, the accepted amount flows into the budget automatically, and the next progress draw can include it — scope, price and schedule staying in agreement because they live in the same record. The days of "the client approved it verbally, I'll remember" are the days that cost contractors the most.

Related: jobs grow out of won deals in the CRM, and their draws bill through invoicing — sale to schedule to paid.

How this compares

Generic project boards — Trello, Asana, Monday — are polished and everywhere, and for software-style task tracking they're fine. Construction-specific platforms like Procore go deep but are priced and shaped for much larger jobs. The gap both leave for small service businesses: the project board doesn't know what the job spends. Budget is a number someone typed in; actual cost lives in purchasing, invoicing and timesheets somewhere else entirely.

That connection is the reason this module exists. Boards, milestones, dependencies (cycle-proof, with a guard that blocks premature moves) and a hand-drawn-feeling Gantt cover the scheduling half. The money half is real: job costing rolls up purchase orders awarded through acquisition, billable time from tracked entries, and manual costs — with revenue from invoices alongside, not in another tab. Change orders are estimate documents that amend the budget when accepted, and a client portal publishes milestones, accepted changes and payable invoices to the customer without exposing your costs. Daily logs keep the site record. When a deal closes in the CRM, the project can create itself, pre-loaded. The board is half the product; the ledger it sits on is the other half.

Try it

Projects lives under Projects in your sidebar. Win a deal in the CRM and watch the project create itself; open it, set a budget, log one cost and one hour, and generate the portal link to send yourself. Walk the page as your client would — that's the demo.