Projects are records for managing your work outside of sales, such as installations, onboarding, maintenance, event planning, and even internal processes, like hiring or website management. Projects help you manage tasks, and include Pipelines or Milestones to organize your work.
Skip to our article on Customizing Projects.
While you can create Projects manually, they can also be created automatically at the end of a sales process when someone converts an Opportunity.
Display all a Project's connections with links and view related contacts (like customers, advisers, and contractors), emails to track communications, and files to keep contracts or specifications at hand.
Task Management
The most important function of Projects is to organize tasks. This can be done in two ways, with Milestones or Pipelines.
Pipelines are a standardized series of steps set up by your Insightly administrator. They're useful for businesses who have a standard processes for most projects.
Milestones are a flexible way to set target dates and can also be used to group tasks. They're created as you go, so they're great for businesses whose projects vary.
Projects with Pipelines
For businesses that repeatedly follow the same series of steps for similar jobs, Pipelines will help you organize your Project's tasks and keep things moving forward.
- Used to create and apply a process of sequential stages.
- May only be set up and modified by your Insightly administrator.
- Can be combined with activity sets for automatic task and event creation.
- Tasks can be related to each project stage.
When a Pipeline is included in a project, the current stage is visible and can be changed from the Project view. Combined with activity sets, moving to a new stage can even create tasks and events automatically.
When viewing a list of projects, you can also select the Kanban view, in which you can see all Projects in a selected Pipeline. You can also move them between stages by dragging them from one to the other.
Projects with Milestones
For Projects that have multiple teams working on different priorities, a linear Pipeline might not be the best fit. Milestones offer another way of grouping tasks.
- They allow you to set dates for each Milestone.
- Future Milestones can be automatically shifted when a Milestone date is edited.
- They may be created when needed by anyone working on the Project.
- Tasks can be associated with each Milestone.
- Both the Milestones and tasks require manual entry.
Milestones and their due dates will be displayed in the Milestones subtab. If your project has a Pipeline applied to it, the Milestones subtab will not appear.
If you'd like more information on Projects, watch our video.
Additional Resources for Admins: