Welcome to Avaza! Successful project management relies on effective task management, strong collaboration with team and customers and efficient analytical tools that help you stay on track. Here is how you can do this in Avaza.
Avaza Projects lets you manage both internal and customer projects in one place. Avaza is great for businesses of all types – your projects can be big or small, have one or more team members working on them, and use all or just some of the features Avaza offers.
Projects are broken down into sections and tasks allowing team members to collaborate and organize their work under one roof. Tasks each have their own email-enabled discussion history, so you can centrally track your team & customer discussions on task.
You can plan your project out with our optional resource scheduling module. This will allow you to assign work based on user availability as well as forecast cost and billable amounts.
To help manage costs you can set project budgets, record expenses and track timesheets against the project and tasks. If you’re charging a customer for your work, you have the flexibility to charge fixed amounts as work is completed and/or set time-based billable rates. Billable rates can be set for each team member or category of work.
Similarly, expense categories can be set up as billable or non-billable and optionally with fixed and percentage based default markups to use when invoicing.
Whenever you create an Invoice for a customer, you can add billable Timesheets, Fixed Amounts, and Expenses to the invoice. You can even give your clients the convenience & flexibility to pay you online via Paypal, Payoneer or a credit card (via Stripe).
Avaza has numerous powerful reports available to help you understand and improve your business. For example, reports to monitor project progress, track budgets, resource utilization & project profitability.
Let’s dive into Projects, and how you can quickly get started with Avaza.
Viewing Projects
Most teams work on more than one project at the same time. To view all projects, click on “All Projects” in the Projects module.
Figure: View All Projects Using Side Navigation
The All Projects page has two tabs across the top — Active and Archived — each with its own set of views. Active opens on a list of your projects showing project status, customer, project owner, tags and categories, along with a quick overview of completed versus total tasks in each project. Use the 3-dot control on any row to archive a project or open its settings.
You can shape this page to suit how you work:
- Choose your columns with the Fields button, and drag column headers to reorder them.
- Group your projects by Customer, Project Owner, Project Category or Visibility.
- Sort by any column, ascending or descending.
- Filter by project title, code, customer, dates, owner, category, tags or archive status. Your active filters are always visible on the toolbar, and you can remove any of them with a single click.
- Search across your projects using the search control on the toolbar.
Figure: View All Projects Grouped by Customer
Best of all, you can save any combination of these as a named view and return to it in one click — see Custom Views below.
Three ways to see your portfolio
On the Active tab, the All Projects page offers three layouts:
- List — your projects in a table, with the columns you choose.
- Kanban — your whole portfolio as cards in columns. Drag projects between columns to move them through your pipeline.
- Gantt — every project’s start and end dates on one timeline, so overlaps and capacity crunches are easy to spot. Zoom between Year, Month and Week, and export the timeline to PDF.
Archiving projects
We recommend archiving completed projects, which blocks further access and prevents users from making changes, while the data remains available via reports. Archived projects don’t count against the project quota on your subscription and can be restored at any time.
To see your archived projects, switch to the Archived tab on the All Projects page. The 3-dot control on each row offers Restore from Archive and Delete.
The Archived tab uses the List layout only — Kanban and Gantt are available on Active projects. You can still create and save your own views on the Archived tab, with the columns, grouping, sorting and filters you want.
Figure: Archived Projects View
Creating Your First Project
Ready to get started? Let’s create your first project.
Figure: Click +Add Project from Projects Drop-Down or the Quick-Access Button
When creating a project, you can link it to a new or existing Customer. If you’re creating a project for internal purposes, you can simply leave the Customer field empty.
Figure: Create a New Project popup
The ‘Project Members’ field automatically displays internal users that have the “Add to all new projects” option enabled via the Contacts page. You can add the relevant project members while creating the new project, or take care of it later via Project Settings.
Avaza also allows you to use a previous project as a template. This feature copies all sections and tasks from the existing project, resetting task status to Not Started, and also allows you to choose a variety of additional settings & data to be copied across. Many teams find this useful when they have similar projects for different, or even the same, customer.
Working Inside a Project
Open any project and you’ll find a bar of tabs across the top. Each tab is a view — a way of looking at that project’s work — and switching between them takes a single click.
Figure: Project Task List View
Avaza gives you these layouts to work with:
- Summary — an at-a-glance overview of the project, built from widgets you choose.
- List — all your tasks in a table, grouped into sections or by any field you like.
- Board — tasks as cards on a Kanban-style board. Drag cards between columns to update them — for example, group by Assigned To and drag a task to reassign it.
- Gantt — a timeline with task dependencies and auto-scheduling of start and end dates.
- Calendar — your tasks laid out by date, in Month, Week or Day.
- Files — every file uploaded across the project, browsable in list or grid.
Each layout has its own toolbar for grouping, sorting, choosing fields, searching and filtering — and whatever you set up can be saved.
Custom Views
Instead of setting up the same filters, columns, grouping and sorting every time, you can save any configuration as a named view that lives as a tab at the top of the page.
- Save “My overdue tasks”, “Client review board” or “This week’s priorities” once, and it’s waiting for you every time.
- Each view remembers your filters, visible columns, sorting and grouping.
- Keep views personal, or share them with your team so everyone works from the same window onto the project. A shared view shares the setup, not the access — each person still sees only the tasks their permissions allow.
- Views you create on a project apply across all your projects, so a good setup works everywhere.
Custom Views are available on the project page, My Tasks, All Tasks and All Projects. Our Custom Views guide covers creating, sharing and managing views in detail.
Avaza Project Concepts
Here are the major concepts you’ll find useful for working with projects in Avaza.
1. Task Types & Status Workflows
Task Types allow your team to differentiate between different types of tasks your team works with. For example, you might create separate Task Types for Issues, Bugs, Change Requests, Campaigns, Leads, Ideas and so forth.
Each of these Task Types can have their own workflow of Custom Task Statuses and be optionally used to enforce a specific sequence for statuses that users can select.
For instance, if you have two types of tasks (Features & Bugs) that follow a different status workflow, simply create two task types with the list of specific statuses for each type and you are good to go.
Initially your account starts with one Task Type called “Task” created with three statuses “Not Started”, “In Progress”, “Complete” that reflect a basic status lifecycle. However, your account Administrator can create new Task Types and configure custom task statuses to suit your business by navigating to Settings > Project Management Settings page.
Figure: Example Task Type “Development” with its custom set of Statuses
Learn more about Task Types in this guide and about custom task statuses in this guide.
2. Sections
Use Sections to group related Tasks together. Sections are really useful for representing stages of a project, milestones, different mini-projects within the project, etc.
Sections can be renamed by clicking on the section header and re-ordered using drag and drop.
Sections can also be collapsed, either one at a time using the arrow on the section header, or all at once using the Collapse control on the toolbar.
3. Tasks in Avaza Projects
Tasks are the heartbeat of Avaza Projects. Work is created, estimated, assigned, collaborated on and delivered via tasks.
You can create tasks for yourself or your team members. Tasks can have due dates, attachments, tags, and can also be discussed online & via email. They can be broken down into subtasks, so that work becomes more manageable. Schedule assignments can be linked to tasks as well.
Our Task Management Guide runs you through task creation, management, and collaboration in more detail.
4. Files in Avaza Projects
Files can be uploaded and attached to Projects, Tasks and Task Discussions. The Files view on each project brings together every file uploaded across the project, where you can browse, search and filter in either list or grid layout.
Our File Management Guide covers everything you need to know about managing your files in Avaza.
5. Project Summary
The Summary view gives you a quick overview of the project — task status, the rate at which tasks are being completed versus the total, and other widgets you can add or remove to suit what matters on that project. These stats and graphs help you quickly spot projects that might be in danger of not being completed on time.
The Task Progress widget shows tasks not yet started, in progress, completed and overdue for each Task Type. These statistics are clickable and act as shortcuts to filtering your task list by status. You can drag-select date ranges on the chart to zoom in.
6. Project Members
Your team and customer contacts can be added to a project to collaborate on tasks, track time and expenses.
Here are the steps to add a user to a project:
a) Via the Contacts screen, invite them to Avaza and ensure they are assigned the “Project Collaborator” role at the least.
b) Check “Add to all New Projects” and/or “Add to Existing Projects” to add them to appropriate projects automatically. You can also add them to specific projects.
You can also invite existing team members to a project via Project Settings, or create a new user at the time.
Note: To ensure the project member has the required permissions as well as cost/billable rates at the project level, make sure to assign them the relevant user roles and cost/billable rates before you add them to the project. Changes made to the user roles and rates on the Contacts page will not affect existing projects they are already members of.
The Avaza Contacts Guide takes you through global user roles, permissions and more.
7. Project Settings
Every project has a set of settings where you enter project notes, manage budgets, team members, billable rates, timesheet approvals and more. Open them from the 3-dot control next to the project title — settings now open in a tabbed popup, so you can move between sections without leaving the page.
Only users with the Admin, Finance Manager, Portfolio Manager and conditionally Project Manager role at account level can access project-specific settings.
Our Project Settings Guide runs you through all the project settings you can configure, as well as billable rates and project budget settings.
8. Billing Methods
Our Project Settings Guide provides an overview of the various approaches for billing customers in Avaza.
9. Project Management Settings
The Project Management Settings page, accessed via Account Settings, allows you to define the Default Billing Method and Default Budget Method, which is useful if all (or most) of your projects follow the same template.
You can also use this page to define your Project Categories / Tags, and Task Priorities / Types / Statuses / Tags.
10. Project Reports
Our Project Reporting Guide walks you through some of the key reports that will help you manage your projects & people and provide insight to support your decision making.
Hope this guide is helpful in understanding how to create and manage projects in Avaza. If you need further help, feel free to contact our support team via chat or by emailing support@avaza.com.