Creating projects

The guided project setup - scope it to real assets, set its phase and team, and understand what closeout does to the linked registry.

Projects → New opens a guided creator that front-loads the decisions that matter. Ten deliberate minutes here saves the mid-project scramble to reconstruct what the project was actually for.

1. Identity

Name, description, project type, and the planned window (start/end). Use names your council or board will recognize - these flow into reports.

Attach what the project touches:

Scope drives four things: project costs post against the linked records' history, the dashboard can slice spend by building and system, the Capital Brief counts the project's budget as Committed funding (split across the linked system classes and infrastructure networks), and closeout can update the linked assets (see below).

3. Phase

Set the project's current phase - design, procurement, construction, closeout, or your own structure. Phase options are editable categories (Settings → Categories), and the phase is a single field you advance as the project moves; the fine grain of scheduling lives in tasks.

Each phase also carries a Means setting - active, on hold, complete, or cancelled - which is how the rest of the app reads your phase names:

Name your phases whatever your organization calls them; set Means once per phase and the reporting follows.

4. Team

Add team members and their project roles - project manager, site lead, finance contact. Team membership is what routes updates and puts the project on people's dashboards.

5. Budget skeleton

Set the approved budget now, even as one number - creating a project with a budget auto-seeds a single "Headline budget" line, and the full breakdown can come after tender. A project with no budget reports 0% spent forever, which helps nobody.

Document folders

Each project gets a document area. Folder templates let your organization stamp a standard structure - 01 Approvals, 02 Design, 03 Tender, 04 Construction, 05 Closeout - onto a project so filing stays predictable across PMs. Pick a template at creation; templates themselves are managed from a project's Documents tab.

The Assets tab

Once linked, each asset in scope gets a per-asset action - repair, replace, or good - with an estimated cost, so the project records not just which assets it touches but what it intends for each. Select multiple assets to assign an action in bulk, and generate work orders straight from the selection to hand the physical work to the crew.

What closeout does - read before you use it

When you move a project into a phase whose Means is complete, a dialog offers to update the linked registry: reset condition scores to 100, reset purchase dates to today, both, or neither. It follows the setting, not the name, so you can call that phase Closeout, Handover, or Substantial Completion.

Used deliberately, this is the loop closing: the renewal project completes, the assets it renewed read as new, and the next lifecycle forecast starts from reality.

After creation