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Projects

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Projects manage work outside of sales: installations, onboarding, maintenance, event planning, and internal processes.

On this page:

What projects are

Where opportunities track potential deals, projects track delivery work. Projects can also be created automatically when a won Opportunity converts, not just manually.

Insightly Project Record with Pipeline Stages — This screenshot shows a project detail page in Insightly CRM for a video tutorial about dashboards, displaying fields like status, category, owner, and a visual pipeline tracker at Stage 2 of 5. It helps readers understand how project information and pipeline progress are organized and viewed within the platform.

A project organizes its tasks one of two ways: Pipelines or Milestones: never both:

  • Pipelines are a fixed sequence of stages set up by an administrator, best for work that follows the same steps every time. Tasks can be tied to specific stages, and combined with activity sets, moving to a new stage can create tasks and events automatically.
Project Pipeline Stages With Tasks and Events — A diagram showing a project broken into three sequential pipeline stages, each containing associated tasks and events. This illustrates how Insightly organizes project workflows by grouping related tasks and events within distinct pipeline stages.
  • Milestones are flexible, admin-independent dates that anyone on the project can create as needed, with tasks attached to each. Better suited to projects that vary or involve multiple teams with different priorities. Editing a Milestone’s date can automatically shift future Milestones. Milestones and their due dates appear in a project’s Milestones subtab, which is hidden if the project uses a Pipeline instead.

Creating and customizing

Create projects and configure them for how your team delivers. Before starting, decide whether the project will use a Pipeline or Milestones, and make sure any related contacts or organizations already exist.

  1. Click the Add New Item (+) button and select Add New Project.
Adding a New Project in Insightly CRM — A dropdown menu is open in the Insightly CRM interface, showing quick-add options including “Add New Project,” which is highlighted and selected. This illustrates how users can create a new project directly from the top navigation bar while viewing the Projects list.

2. Enter a name. A consistent naming pattern (customer, product or service, and target completion date) makes projects easier to find later (e.g. “Pool Maintenance | Bushwood Country Club | April 2018”).

Adding a New Project in Insightly CRM — The screenshot shows the “Add New Project” form in Insightly CRM, with a project named “Pool Maintenance | Bushwood Coun” entered in the Project Name field and the Status set to “Not Started.” This illustrates how to begin creating a new project by filling in the required details, which is a key step for users tracking work within the CRM.

3. Select a category if applicable. Administrators can customize the available options.

Selecting a Category from Dropdown Menu — The screenshot shows a Project Details form in Insightly CRM where a user is selecting “CLEANING” from an expanded Category dropdown list. This illustrates how to assign a category to a project, which helps organize and classify projects within the system.

4. If using a Pipeline, select it and choose a starting stage. If using Milestones instead, leave the Pipeline field set to “Nothing Selected.”

Selecting a Stage in Pool Cleaning Pipeline — A dropdown menu is open under the Stage field within the Pool Cleaning pipeline, showing options such as Schedule Service, Purchase Supplies, Hire Crew, Prep Pool, Clean, and Follow-up Survey, with “Hire Crew” currently highlighted. This illustrates how users can assign or change the stage of a record within a specific pipeline to track progress through a workflow.

5. Fill in any custom fields your administrator has set up.

Custom Date Field in Project Record — This screenshot shows a “Project Custom Fields” section containing a date input field labeled “Date of Date” with a calendar picker icon. It illustrates how custom date fields appear on a project record, helping users understand where to enter or view date-type custom field data.

6. Set viewing permissions: Everyone, only the owner, a specific team, or specific people. (This step doesn’t appear if the account uses Advanced Permissions instead.)

Insightly CRM Record Visibility Permission Options — This shows the Permissions section of a record settings screen, where users can set visibility to Everyone, Only the record owner, Select a team, or Select individual people, with “Everyone” currently selected. This setting controls who within the CRM can view a particular record, making it important for managing data privacy and access control.

7. Click Save. To create another project right away, click Save & New instead.

Once created, the project’s Milestones subtab (when Milestones rather than a Pipeline is in use) shows upcoming and past milestones together, each with its assignee, status, and due date.

Project Milestones Tab with Upcoming and Past Milestones — The Milestones tab of an Insightly project named “Account Management - Aaron Blake” displays two sections: Upcoming Milestones showing two incomplete tasks assigned to Tony Roma due January 25, 2018, and Past Milestones showing one incomplete follow-up task assigned to Ben Outlook due January 11, 2018. This view helps users track and manage project milestones, their assignments, statuses, and due dates in one place.

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