Projects

Projects organize work into named buckets. They can be attached to any number of clients or kept "floating" (with no client) — a project shared by two clients, say a split retainer, links to both. Tasks, documents, invoices, and — through tasks — time entries all hang off projects, and you can link related projects together with relationship types you define yourself.

What you can do

Browse all your projects on the Projects page, where rows expand to show detail, you can filter by client, status, and tags, and flagged projects — plus any whose end date has passed — are highlighted. The clients column lists each linked client as a clickable chip, collapsing to a "+N" you can click when there are several. Projects marked internal carry a house icon beside their name. Create a new project using a two-column form, adding clients, tasks, and relationships inline. Open a project to see its basic info, status, an inline tasks list with a "Connect existing" linker, its relationships, and its related documents. From there you can edit any field or open its full edit history.

Each project gets an ID like P-7, which sorts numerically.

Fields you fill in

Name — required, unique per workspace (max 500 characters).
Description — optional (max 50,000 characters).
Clients — optional, and you can pick more than one. Add each from the picker; remove one with the × on its chip. Leaving it empty makes the project floating.
Status — required, drawn from Custom statuses. When a project moves to a status marked finished, Ceum records when it finished.
Start date — optional. Defaults to today in your timezone on the create form.
End date — optional. If both dates are set, the end date must not come before the start date.
Hourly rate — optional override, the most specific level of the brand → client → project chain. Leave it blank to inherit; the field shows the inherited value and which level it came from. When the project links to exactly one client, it inherits that client's rate — with no clients or several, it inherits from Brand & invoicing, because there is no single parent to inherit from.
Invoicing currency — optional override with the same inheritance. New invoices for this project start in this currency.
Budget — optional spend ceiling for the project, in the project's invoicing currency (or your account currency when that's inherited). Leave it blank for no budget. Zero is a real value meaning the project shouldn't be billed at all. When a budget is set, the project's sidebar shows a progress bar: brand-coloured under 80%, yellow from 80%, red once it's fully used, and never past 100% however far over it goes.
Mute budget alerts — appears once a budget is set. Stops this project appearing under budget alerts while keeping the budget, the progress bar, and its flag and end-date alerts. Clearing the budget clears the mute.
Internal project — an optional toggle marking the project as in-house work rather than work for a client. It is a label and nothing more: an internal project alerts, bills, and reports exactly like any other. A house icon appears beside the name in the projects list and on the project's own page, and hovering it says the project is marked as internal.
Tags — optional; tag names not yet in your library are created automatically.
Flagged + flag description — an optional toggle (description max 500 characters) to mark a project for attention. Flagged projects are highlighted in the list and surface in Alerts, where the description is shown as the reason.

Workflows

Create a project

Open the new project form.
Enter a name. Optionally add one or more clients; leave it blank for a floating project.
Pick a status; set start/end dates if you know them.
Optionally add tasks inline at the bottom of the form, and set up project-to-project relationships.
Save. The project appears at the bottom of each of its clients' project lists (or the floating group) with the next ID.

Update a project

Use Edit, change any field, and save. Changes are recorded in the changelog with their before/after values. The form prompts you before navigating away from unsaved edits.

Delete a project

Use the Delete button on the project's detail page or its edit page, then confirm. Deleting a project removes it from any tasks, clients, invoices, and documents it was linked to — those items stay; they just lose this project. See Tips and edge cases.

Reorder projects within a client

On a client's detail page, drag projects to set their order. The order is kept per client, so you can only reorder projects within a single client — and a project shared by several clients keeps an independent position in each client's list.

Flag a project

Use the row action menu or the Flag button on the detail page to mark a project for attention and optionally add a reason. Flagged rows are highlighted in the list.

Status workflow

Projects pull statuses from Custom statuses, configured under Project statuses. Each status carries the following settings:

Finished — when a project moves into this status, Ceum records that it finished; moving out clears that.
Backlog — usually used to hide low-priority projects from default views.
Enabled, order, and color — control visibility and presentation.

There is no enforced workflow; you move projects between statuses freely.

Project-to-project relationships

Relationship types are defined per workspace under Project relationships. Each type has a name, color, and order. Relationships have a direction (from one project to another), can't be duplicated for the same pair and type, and a project can't link to itself. See Entity relationships for the user-facing concept and Project relationships to configure the type list.

How it connects to the rest of Ceum

Clients — a project can belong to several clients at once, or none. It appears in each linked client's inline project list, and can be attached or detached from either side.
Tasks — a task can belong to several projects, including this one. The detail page lists a project's tasks inline and includes a "Connect existing" picker, which attaches an existing task rather than copying it. Each row can be unlinked (detaching the task from this project, keeping the task and its other projects) or deleted (destroying the task, after asking what to do with any time tracked against it). Deleting a project removes it from its tasks but leaves the tasks themselves in place.
Documents — a project's related documents appear read-only on its detail page; full management lives in Documents. Deleting a project leaves its documents in place but unlinks them.
Invoices — an invoice can reference a project. There's no dedicated panel on the project detail page; filter the invoices list by project instead. Invoices against a project are what consume its budget, alongside any income transactions linked to it — billing counts, whether or not the client has paid yet.
Time entries — linked through tasks. A project's total tracked time adds up the time on its tasks, counting each entry once even when an entry spans tasks in more than one project; only a per-project breakdown can sum higher than the overall total.
Tags — shared with the tagging system across Ceum.
Alerts — flagged projects, projects whose end date has passed, and projects that have used 80% or more of their budget are highlighted in the list and surface in Alerts. All of them stop once the project reaches a status marked finished.
Changelog — every field change is captured with the actor, timestamp, and before/after values.

Totals on the detail page

The detail sidebar shows read-only totals for a project, worked out across your whole account rather than the rows on screen:

Total hours, split into billable and non-billable. Time counts as billable when the first task an entry is linked to has a task type marked billable; anything else counts as non-billable. Running timers are excluded — their duration is still moving.
Invoiced (paid) and invoiced (pending) — invoices in a status marked finished, and everything else.
Other income — income transactions linked to the project, i.e. money that never went through an invoice.
Expenses — expense transactions linked to the project.

Amounts are shown converted into your account currency, with the per-currency breakdown in a tooltip. When an exchange rate isn't available, the figures are listed per currency instead of being added together.

These figures are derived, so there's nothing to edit here — change the invoices, transactions, or time entries they come from.

Import and export

Import — bring projects in from a CSV or XLS file on the Projects import page. Required columns: name and status. Optional: description, client (matched by name, ignoring case, and linked automatically if found), start date, end date, and tags. After importing, you can link orphan tasks to the newly created projects in the same wizard. See Import CSV.
Export — choose columns (name, description, client, tags, status, dates, tasks list/count) and a format (CSV, XLS, or PDF) on the Projects exports page. See Export data.
Bulk edit — select projects on the list and edit or delete them together. See Bulk edit. Reordering is still supported within a single client only.

Tips and edge cases

Floating projects. Projects with no client are valid and useful for client-agnostic work (internal R&D, ops, infrastructure).
Shared projects. A project can belong to several clients at once; removing one client (or deleting that client) leaves the project linked to the rest, and a project left with no clients simply becomes floating.
Deleting unlinks, it doesn't cascade to tasks. Deleting a project removes its own relationships and detaches it from its tasks, clients, invoices, and documents — all of which stay. A task left with no projects becomes floating rather than being deleted.
End date must follow start date. Inverted dates are rejected.
Unique names per workspace. Two projects can't share a name in your workspace.
A budget of zero isn't the same as no budget. Blank means the project has no ceiling; zero means it shouldn't be billed at all, so any billing at all puts it fully over.
Mixed currencies are converted for the budget. Invoices and income in another currency are converted into the project's currency using the latest exchange rates. If a rate is missing, the amounts that can't be converted are left out and the sidebar says so, rather than silently adding them up one-for-one.

On mobile

Create and edit projects in a native bottom-sheet form with native pickers, including the hourly rate, invoicing currency, and budget; list rows respect compact density. Muting a project's budget alerts is web-only for now — a project muted on the web stays muted when you save it from your phone. Cached projects stay readable offline, but creating, editing, and deleting need a connection — only transactions and time entries can be changed offline. See Offline support.
Relationships use the simplified add/delete sheet — see Entity relationships.