Projects Overview

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

Most of the time you don't need one. A single wedding, a single corporate party, a single birthday. That's one job and one job is enough. Projects earn their place when the same client has booked you more than once and wants to deal with the whole lot as a single arrangement.

Think of a venue that has you in every Monday for 7 weeks. Or a festival running across 4 days with a different setup each day. Or a tour that moves city to city. Each date is still its own job with its own timings, equipment and staff. But the client doesn't want 7 contracts and 7 invoices. They want one. That's a project.

What sits at project level

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

Timeline gives you a Gantt view of every job in the project. Each job gets its own row so you can see the shape of the booking across weeks or months, zoom in and out, and spot gaps or clashes at a glance.

Quote is where the money lives. Every job in the project is listed with its date, its status and its own subtotal, tax and total. Underneath that you get a combined subtotal, tax and total for the whole project. There's a Copy Link button so you can send the client a single link covering everything you've quoted, rather than firing over 7 separate quotes and hoping they read all of them.

Details, Files, Tasks, Activity and Data work the way you'd expect, applied to the project as a whole rather than to any one job.

Contacts sit in the panel on the right. You set a primary contact and add as many others as you need. Useful when the person signing the contract isn't the person on site, which on venue and corporate work is nearly always the case.

Creating a project

There are 2 ways in.

Create one from scratch using Add Project, then add jobs to it as they're confirmed. This is the route when you already know the shape of the booking. The client has told you they want 7 dates, so you build the project and fill it.

Or group jobs you already have. If a client has booked 3 separate jobs over the past few weeks and then asks for one invoice, you don't have to rebuild anything. Pull the existing jobs into a project after the fact.

The second route is the one most operators end up using, because bookings rarely arrive in a tidy batch.

Leads and confirming

Jobs added to a project start as unconfirmed. You'll see a banner at the top of the project telling you how many leads are still unconfirmed, with a Confirm button next to it.

That's deliberate. It means you can build out a full multi-date proposal, quote the client for the whole thing, and hold every date without any of it counting as confirmed business until the client says yes. Once they do, confirm from the banner and the jobs move through in one go.

Payments

This is the part that makes projects worth using.

Payments can be taken against the project as a whole, so the client pays one amount covering every job in it. That's the standard case 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 live under the same project umbrella, still share the same contract and still report together. Only the payment is separated.

When to use a project

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

Don't use one for a single job with multiple booths. That's still one job. Don't use one just because a client has booked you twice in a year with nothing connecting the 2 bookings. A project adds a layer, and a layer you don't need is just admin.

The test is simple. If the client thinks of it as one booking, make it a project. If they think of it as separate bookings that happen to be with the same supplier, leave them as jobs.

What's next

This is the overview. Separate articles cover project quotes and contracts, payments and invoicing across a project, the timeline view, and grouping existing jobs into a project.