Last updated 2026-04-25

Projects and clients

OtiumWork uses two first-class entities for billable work attribution:

  • Client — a billing entity (e.g., "Acme Corp"). Has a stage (prospect / active / archived), billing email, notes. Lives at /admin/clients.
  • Project — work done for a client (e.g., "Acme Q3 feasibility study"). Has status, budget, start/end dates, team assignments. Lives at /projects.

Every work event can be linked to a project; every project belongs to a client; reports aggregate up the chain.

Who can do what

Employee Manager Admin
Create project ✓ (auto-assigned as member)
Edit project Only if you created it ✓ for your team's
Assign people to project ✓ for your direct reports
View project detail Only if you're assigned or created it ✓ for your team's
Create client
Change client stage

Client stages

  • Prospect — you're doing pre-sales work, not yet a paying customer. Hours here count as pre-sales investment (/reports/presales).
  • Active — paying customer. Hours on active-stage clients count as billable.
  • Archived — dormant or lost deal. Hours stay in history but are ignored by active reports.

When a prospect signs, flip their stage to active from /admin/clients — pre-sales hours retroactively count as converted investment.

Project status

  • planned — not started yet (shows on Gantt but not in active views)
  • active — in progress
  • on_hold — paused
  • completed — done and billed
  • canceled — shut down before completion
  • archived — historical / imported (hidden from /projects by default; click + Show N archived to reveal)

Jumping to a specific project

The filter bar on /projects and /projects/gantt has a Jump to → dropdown listing every non-archived project alphabetically. Picking one navigates straight to that project's detail page (per-task table + per-person time-spent breakdown). On the unified Gantt at /projects, project name labels are also clickable.

Budgets + alerts

Projects can have: - Budget hours — e.g., "200 hours allocated" - Budget dollars — hard spend ceiling - Alert threshold — default 80%; when logged hours × hourly_rate crosses this fraction of budget, admins get an email alert

Linking events to projects

Three ways:

  1. Desktop client correction — right-click tray icon → Review recent events → pick project from dropdown.
  2. Web review page/events/mine, edit inline or use bulk-link.
  3. Rules — admins create pattern-based rules at /admin/rules that auto-link matching events.

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