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.
Click the project button in the top left of the Project plan page.
Use the keyboard shortcut Shift+P.
From the allocation menu when scheduling.
Project name and color
For each project, you can add a name and a 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, which consists of several sections:
Info
Estimates (if saved)
Budget
Expenses
Team
Phases
Tasks
Milestones
Info
The Info section contains general information about the project.
Project code
If your team has project codes enabled in Team Settings > Projects, 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 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.
Project stage
In the Stage field, you can indicate your project’s current state. Each stage is shown with a corresponding status icon. The default stages/statuses are Draft, Tentative, Confirmed, Completed, and Canceled. Account Owners and Admins can customize and map project statuses and stages in Team settings > Projects. To learn more, check the Project statuses and stages article.
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.
📝Note: When the project budget is set by phase, any allocation that is scheduled or logged at the project level (that is, any that does not belong to a specific phase) is considered non-billable, even if the project itself is set as billable.
Project 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 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 > Projects.
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.
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. The Account Owner and Admins always have editing access.
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.
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:
Time & materials
Fixed fee
By project
By phase
By task
Fixed hours
By project
By phase
By task
📝Note: Non-billable tasks do not utilize your project budget.
Project expenses
The Expenses section lets you track and manage project expenses associated with a project.
To add an expense, click on +Add and enter the details: name, cost, quantity, date, and markup (if applicable). Each expense can be set as billable or non-billable. To learn more, see the Project expenses article.
Project team
The Team section displays every team member on the project team and across all phases (if any).
💡Here's a tip: A green dot next to the team member’s name indicates that they already have some time scheduled for this project. If no time is scheduled, the dot is grey.
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.
📝Note: To add them to the project team, use the action menu and choose Grant project-level access.
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.
Using the action menu next to each person's name, you can remove them from a project. This action is irreversible and permanently deletes all of their scheduled and logged time for that project.
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.
Adding resources to a project
Use +Add to add people or unassigned roles to a project individually.
📝Note: The role must be assigned to at least one person in order to use it for planning.
To add the whole department at once, use the All button next to the department name.
To add 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.
Each phase action menu allows you to edit the phase details, view using a filter, and archive the phase.
📝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.
📝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.
📝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 (or logged) 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.
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.
Deleting tasks
To remove a task, select the task name and click Delete.
If you attempt to remove a task that has been 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.
📝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.
📝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 existing ones. Milestones are great for tracking important events within a project’s lifecycle. They can be set as dates or date ranges.
Project action menu
In the top right corner of the project side panel, there are three quick action icons:
- Open project view, which opens the project view
- Duplicate and more, which open the action menu drop-down
- Close side panel
Clicking the three vertical dots opens the project’s action menu.
The action menu includes the following options:
View project report - Opens a Single Project Report by applying the project to the filter.
Duplicate - Creates a copy of the project. You can adjust specific project details as needed.
Shift timeline - Moves all of the project’s tasks, milestones, and phases together.
Create template from project - Quickly generates a project template. You can edit any project and phase details as required.
Archive - Archives the project if you are no longer working on it or if you want to delete it permanently.
Projects page
The Projects page lists all active and archived projects and sorts them by name, project code, phases, client, tags, stage, margin, budget, start/end date, and owner. This is where you can add a new project, create and manage project templates, and import/export the list of your projects.
Project margins
The margin column allows you to view your project's profitability at a glance. It displays the profit margin percentage for each project, giving you a quick profitability health check without needing to look into individual projects’ details.
Margins are only displayed for projects with a fixed fee budget.
The margin is accurate when cost rates and bill rates are properly configured.
The margin column displays an em-dash (—) if a project does not have a fee-based budget (e.g. no budget or fixed hours).
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 stage 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.