Create a new project

1 From the Work menu, choose Projects.

This brings up the Project Summary screen.

Select the Add New Project button.

Or, you can just quickly start setting up a new project from the Overview screen, by choosing New Project from under Quick Links.

Or you can import your projects from Basecamp.

Or you can create a project from an estimate, if that fits more easily with your workflow.

Or, you can start from the contact and choose Project from the Add New menu.

If the contact is hidden, you'll need to use this method.

2 Choose contact

Choose the client you are carrying out this project for. If you haven't yet set them up as a contact in FreeAgent, you'll need to do that.

You can do that quickly by selecting the Add a New Contact link, or you can enter a new contact manually, import a group of contacts from your email programme, or import them from Basecamp.

Note, unless you've started from the Contacts screen to set up your project, if the contact is hidden, you won't see them on this list.

3 Project name and status

Give the project a name.

Set the project as Active, Completed, Cancelled or Hidden.

What's the difference?

If you're choosing a project anywhere else in FreeAgent, for example to create an invoice or link an expense to a project, you can only do that for Active projects.

You can still create invoices for a Completed, Cancelled or Hidden project, but you'd have to start from within the project itself.

The idea with the different statuses is to keep the lists of projects elsewhere in FreeAgent to just your Active projects.

You can also give the project a numeric or alphanumeric reference, which could also be called a purchase order reference, if you like.

4 Project-level invoice numbering

Tick the Project Level Invoice Sequence box if you want to use an invoice numbering sequence just for this project, e.g. Proj001, Proj002. If you have invoice numbering set to client-level sequence for this contact, ticking this box will override this setting and project-level numbering will be used.

5 Time and money

Set the currency for this project. Please note, when you issue invoices for a project you can only issue them in the project's currency. You can't, for example, issue £ sterling invoices for a project that's in Euros.

Set a budget of time for this project, if you want to. Leave this box as zero if there's no set budgeted time. Don't worry if you go over your budget, FreeAgent won't stop you recording more time on to the project.

Choose the number of hours you'll be working each day on the project. So if a working day on this project would be 6 hours, put 6.00 in the "Hours per day" box. This will be used if, later, you set a task with a rate per day rather than per hour.

If you have a set billing rate for this project, that you want to use on timeslips and on the invoices, put that rate in. If you want to set rates for individual tasks in the project, those rates will override the default project rate.

6 More Options

Select the arrow next to More Options to show this area.

Here, you have the option to set whether or not this project comes under IR35 as de facto employment. This makes it easier to distinguish between projects that are inside and outside IR35 when it comes to working out your deemed payment.

You can also set start and finish dates for the project, and decide whether or not you would like to see unbillable time, that is, time that you've spent on this project but won't charge your client for, on your project profitability graphic.

Once you've finished, select Create New Project to save this information and start working with your project, or Cancel to close without saving.