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Projects

Organise your team's tasks within the projects

Justyna Kawalec avatar
Written by Justyna Kawalec
Updated this week

For a quick overview, check the Projects video guide.

Projects help you organize your tasks, team, and important milestones together in one place.​ Projects can be created by the Account Owner, Billing guests, Admins, and Managers with Add and manage Projects, including budgets if viewable permission.

Add a project

There are a few different ways to add a project:

  • Click the + button in the top-right of Float and then Add project.

    Adding a new project from the Schedule and Project plan.

  • Click the project button in the top left of the Project plan page.

    Adding a new project on the Project plan page.

  • Use the keyboard shortcut Shift+P.

  • From the allocation menu when scheduling.

    Adding a new project from the allocation menu.

When adding a new project, you can choose to create a new blank project (draft, tentative, or confirmed) or use one of the existing project templates.

Adding a new blank project or using the template.

📝Note: Selecting Always start from a confirmed project hides your templates when adding a new project. To show templates again, go to the Projects page, select Manage templates, and enable Show templates when I create new projects.

Show project templates setting.

Project name and color

For each project, you can add a name and a color.

Change project name and color

📝Note: The project name field has a 255-character limit. Leaving the project name field blank will result in a project called *New Project.

Project settings

Project details can be set up and edited in the configuration panel. It consists of six sections:

  • Info

  • Budget

  • Team

  • Phases

  • Tasks

  • Milestones

Project info

The Info section contains general information about the project.

Project code

If your team has project codes enabled in Team Settings > Clients & Project codes, you can assign a unique code to each project. This field is useful for tracking job or project numbers that are specific to your organization.

Project code field in the project configuration panel

Project Owner

The Owner field lets you assign the Project Owner - the person responsible for the project. By default, the project creator is set as the owner, but ownership can be reassigned to any team member with access rights.

Setting up Project Owner

​Project Status

In the Status field, you can set your project to be a Draft, Tentative, or Confirmed

Setting up project status

Project statuses are displayed on the Projects page, where you can easily distinguish them based on the status icon and sort them as needed.

Project statuses on the Projects page.

Draft projects

The Draft status allows teams to test different project configurations—such as team members, dates, or phases—without displaying them on the live schedule. This is especially helpful when exploring scenarios before confirming a project.

Draft project visibility is limited: their allocations, phases, and milestones appear only in the Project Plan and Project View, shown as dashed outlines.


Draft projects are not visible to Managers unless they are the Project Owners or the Managers with ‘manage projects’ permission can edit this project setting is enabled for the project. 

Draft allocations on the Project view.

Tentative projects

The Tentative status is best for work that is yet to be confirmed. Tentative projects are visible to all team members with access to view projects. 

Allocations from the tentative projects, their phases, and milestones are displayed as color outlines on the Schedule, Project plan, and Project view, indicating that these items are not yet finalized.

Tentative project on the Project view.

Confirmed projects

Allocations, phases, and milestones belonging to projects with Confirmed status are displayed as colored tiles.

Confirmed project on the Project view.


Project status changes

Changing the project status from Draft to Tentative will make all planned allocations, phases, and milestones visible on the Schedule.

Changing the project status from Draft to Confirmed will:

  • Make all planned allocations, phases and milestones visible on the Schedule

  • Notify everyone on the project team

  • Allow the project team to log time against the project (for Pro and Enterprise teams).

Changing the project status from Confirmed to Tentative will:

  • Change all planned allocations, phases, and milestones to tentative on the Schedule

  • Prevent new time entries from being logged against the project (for Pro and Enterprise teams).

Changing the project status from Confirmed or Tentative to Draft will:

  • Change all planned allocations, phases, and milestones to draft on the Project plan and Project view

  • Hide this project from the Schedule

  • Prevent any time entries from being logged against the project (for Pro and Enterprise teams).

Billable / non-billable project setting

You can set the project as billable or non-billable. To have billable and non-billable phases and tasks within a project, set the project to billable and manage individual phases and tasks in the Phases and Tasks sections.

Billable / non-billable project setting

Client

In the Client field, you can choose an existing client from the list or add a new one. Your team’s Account Owner and Admins can manage clients in Team settings > Clients & Project codes

Assigninig a client to a project.

Project tags

To add a new project tag, type its name or select one from the drop-down menu. You can sort and filter any Float page using project tags. Your team’s Account Owner and Admins can manage tags in Team settings > Tags.

Adding a project tag.

Project dates

In the Dates field, you can set the project's start and end date.

Project dates are automatically adjusted based on the first and last allocation, phase, milestone, or logged time record belonging to this project. While you can set the project dates when creating a project, you can’t manually set:

- a start date that’s after the first allocation/phase/milestone/logged time

- an end date that’s before the last allocation/phase/milestone/logged time.

To adjust your project dates, you’ll need to first move the allocations, phases, milestones, or logged time records that are constraining your date range.

Adjusting project dates.

Project Notes

You can add any additional information to your project here. The character limit for project notes is 1500.

💡Here's a tip: To mention someone in a project note, type followed by their name. Depending on their notification preferences, they’ll receive an alert via email, Slack, or mobile push.

Managers with ‘manage projects’ permission can edit this project setting

This setting was previously called All Project Managers have edit rights.

Enable the Managers with ‘manage projects’ permission can edit this project checkbox to allow any Manager with that permission to edit the project. If this box is unchecked, Managers can only edit the project if they’ve been added to the project team in the Team section. Admins and the Account Owner always have editing access. 

Managers with ‘manage projects’ permission can edit this project setting

Estimates (beta)​

​This feature is currently in beta, and work is still in progress. Some functionality may change as we continue to improve it. If you have feedback, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

The estimates are saved snapshots of your project’s data at specific points in time. The Estimates section lists all saved estimates, with the baseline estimate shown as the default.

Project estimates

From here, you can see who created each estimate and when, edit its description, or delete it entirely. You can also change which estimate is set as the baseline and view the estimate report.

Project budget

The Budget section lets you define the budget for your project. You can either set it to No budget or choose from one of the seven available budget types:

  • Hours by project

  • Hours by phase

  • Hours by task

  • Fee by project

  • Fee by phase

  • Fee by task

  • Hourly fee

Non-billable tasks do not utilize your project budget.

Setting a budget for you project.

Project team

The Team section displays every team member on the project team and across all phases (if any). 

Project team

If a team member is assigned to a specific phase/s but not included at the project level, a phase indicator will appear next to their name to show their limited involvement.

Phase indicator in the projects team.

If a team member used to work on a project but has been archived, the Archived indicator will be displayed next to their name. All their historical data remains intact and can still be viewed in the reports.

Archived person indicator in the Team tab.

Removing a person from a project permanently deletes all of their scheduled and logged time for that project. This action is irreversible.

Remove a person from a project.


If a person already has time scheduled on the project, a green dot appears next to their name. If no time is scheduled, the dot is grey.

Scheduled time green dot indicator

Project bill rates

You can set either a custom hourly bill rate for each team member or apply the same bill rate to everyone on the project team. When you add a new person to the project, their personal bill rate is applied by default, but you can override it with a project-specific rate. Changing a team member’s bill rate for one project won’t affect their rates on other projects.

Setting up project bill rates

+Add

Use +Add to add people to a project individually. To assign multiple people at once, use the bulk actions available on the People page.

​📝Note: Currently, there is no limit to the number of team members you can add to a project - each project can include an unlimited number of team members.

Project phases

The Phases section lets you add project phases and set their color and dates. If your project budget is tracked per phase, you can also enter the budget details directly in this section.

Setting up project phases and their budget.

📝Note: By default, a phase inherits the project color, but you can change it at any time.

To set additional phase details, click on a phase to open it in the side panel. Here, you can define the phase status, budget, team, tasks, milestones, and other settings, much like how you manage project-level details.

After a project with multiple phases is created, you can easily navigate between them using the up and down arrows in the top right corner of the page.

Navigating between project phases.

​📝Note: While you can set the tentative phases within a confirmed project, creating confirmed phases in a tentative project is not supported.

Project tasks

Adding tasks

The Tasks section houses all of your project tasks. It does not include phase-specific tasks, which are listed under their corresponding phases.​ Tasks are useful to help group allocations on the reports. You can add new tasks to this list before assigning them to your team or when allocating time. Any task assigned to a team member on the Schedule, Project plan, or Project view is automatically added to this list on the project menu.

​​💡 Here's a tip: Already scheduled tasks have a green dot displayed next to them.

Project's task list

📝Note: Currently, there are no limits on the number of tasks allowed on a project—you can have an unlimited number of tasks in each project.


Setting tasks as non-billable

Within a billable project, you can mark individual tasks as non-billable. These non-billable tasks are excluded from the project budget, and any allocations scheduled for them do not count against the budget. However, non-billable allocations on a billable project are still tracked in reports, allowing you to monitor internal spend.

Setting task as non-billable

Merging tasks together

You can select two or more tasks and merge them into one. When tasks are merged, all instances—including scheduled and logged time—are updated to reflect the new task name.

📝Note: Merging action is irreversible. Once tasks are merged, they cannot be split back into their original form.

Merging tasks

Deleting tasks

To remove a task, select the task name and click Delete.

Deleting a task

If you attempt to remove a task that has been scheduled or used, Float will prompt you to confirm the deletion. Click the bin icon to proceed. This will permanently delete all instances of the task from Float, including all scheduled and logged time associated with it. Note that this action is irreversible. If you don’t intend to lose this data, consider reassigning allocations to another task before deleting, or use the merge option instead. 

Permanently removing a task

📝Note: Bulk deletion of tasks with associated allocations is currently not available. Each task needs to be removed individually.

​Locking the task list with the "Only managers with ‘manage projects’ permission can add to this list" setting

This setting was previously called Only Project Managers can add to this list.

Enabling the Managers with ‘manage projects’ permission can add to this list option locks the task list, ensuring that your team can only schedule and log tasks from the approved list. To help keep things organized, the task list is locked by default for new projects, but you can unlock it at any time if needed.

Locking the tasks list with Managers with ‘manage projects’ permission can add to this list

📝Note: Locking the project task list also applies to all the project’s phases.​ If Managers with ‘manage projects’ permission can add to this list is selected, Managers with manage projects permission who are just the contributors to the project (and not the Project Owners) can add new tasks in the project settings. When allocating time on the Schedule, they will need to select one of the existing tasks.

Project milestones

The Milestones section allows you to add new milestones or manage the existing ones. Milestones are great for tracking important events within a project’s lifecycle. Milestones can be set as a date or a date range.

Project milestones

Project action menu

To access the project’s action menu, click the three vertical dots icon located at the top right corner of the project side panel.

Project's action menu

The action menu includes the following options:

Additional notes

  • Merging projects is not currently supported. If the allocations in one or more projects are duplicated, you can archive the duplicated projects. If you want to keep the allocations from both projects, you'd first need to reassign them to one of the projects manually.

  • Adding custom fields to the project menu is currently not supported. We recommend using the Project tags or the Notes field to store any extra information.

  • The status field on projects and phases can be managed via the API.

  • The Project name field has a 255-character limit.

  • Only one baseline can be set per project.

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