Creating your first project

A project in Phasewise is the unit of work. Phases are the budget breakdown within a project. Staff get assigned to phases (not the project as a whole), which is how Work Plans, profitability reports, and time tracking all add up.

Creating a project

Go to Projects → New Project. Fields:

• Project name — visible to the client on every invoice.
• Project number — auto-numbered using your firm's prefix (e.g. PW-001). Override only if you have a custom numbering convention.
• Client name + email — the email is used when you send invoices.
• City, project type — for filtering and grouping on the Projects list.
• Contract fee — the total agreed-upon fee. Drives profitability calculations.
• Contract / Agreement number — optional. Required by state and federal agencies and most enterprise APs. Renders on the invoice header.
• Start date + target completion — for dashboard timeline tracking.
• Billing cadence — Monthly (default; auto-invoicing cron runs on the 5th), Milestone, or Manual.

Adding phases

Phasewise pre-loads the 7 standard LA phases:

• PreD — Pre-Design
• SD — Schematic Design
• DD — Design Development
• CD — Construction Documents
• BID — Bidding
• CA — Construction Administration
• POC — Post-Construction

You can add custom phases or rename phases per project. For each phase set:

• Budgeted hours — the cap before alerts trigger.
• Budgeted fee — the slice of contract fee allocated to this phase. Phasewise auto-suggests fee splits if you toggle on the auto-estimation, based on your team's billing rates × hours.

Setting up the Work Plan

After saving the project, scroll down to the Work Plan section on the project edit page. For each phase, click + Add staff and pick a team member. Enter their planned hours.

Two important things about Work Plans:

1. Work Plans drive profitability reports. When you assign a staff member with their billing rate to a phase, Phasewise can show you "if you stick to the plan, this phase will earn $X" before any time has been logged.
2. Work Plans drive the staff-side "My Schedule" view. Each staff member sees the phases they're assigned to and how their logged hours track against the plan.

Click Save Work Plan for each phase before clicking Save all changes at the bottom — work-plan edits save through a separate endpoint.

What happens after creation

• The project shows up on /projects for everyone with visibility into it.
• Staff members assigned to phases see it on their /time Time Sheets dropdown so they can log hours.
• The auto-invoicing cron (runs on the 5th of every month) creates a draft invoice for it covering the prior month's approved billable hours, IF the billing cadence is Monthly.
• Budget alerts fire to the Owner when the project hits 75%, 90%, and 100% of total budgeted hours.

Editing phases later

You can add, edit, or remove phases at any time on the project edit page. Note: removing a phase that already has logged time will fail with an error — Phasewise won't orphan time entries. To remove that phase, first re-assign or delete the time entries.