The Managed Project

Everything in Project Management (ECPA) hangs off one record: the Managed Project. It is the engagement itself — one record per job the firm has taken on for one customer. It says who runs the job, what was contracted for and in which currency, when it is meant to start and finish, and how the work is broken down. Tasks, timesheets, expenses and invoices all point back at it, and the numbers they produce are reported here.

You will find it at Project Management > Projects > Managed Project, under licence ecpa.

Throughout this page we follow one job. Nama Architects has won the Riyadh Clinic Fit-out for customer C-0042: a six-month interior job worth 900,000, run by Ahmed S., broken into three phases and two specialities.

A master file, not a document

This is the first thing to understand, because it explains a lot of the screen's behaviour. A Managed Project is a master file in exactly the same sense a customer or an item is: it has a code, a group and two names, it has no book, no document term, no value date, and there is nothing to process. You open it, you edit it, you save it. There is no commit step and nothing is sent to the ledger from here.

That has two consequences worth stating plainly:

• The project itself books nothing. It appears in accounting only as something other documents point at — as a dimension on an invoice, and as the owner of a subsidiary account (see Detail Accounts below). Money reaches a project through tasks, expense documents and invoices, never through this screen. The costing page maps that out in full.
• The project's state is not a workflow. It moves through a Change Project Status button, described further down, and the list of statuses is a list — not a sequence anything enforces.

Page 1 — Main

Basic Information

The identity block: Code, Group, Name1 (the Arabic name) and Name2 (the English name), the Customer, a free description line, and two reference fields that behave differently from everything else on the screen:

• Sales Quotation is greyed out. You never fill it in. It is stamped by the project sales quotation when its Create Project And Tasks button builds the project — which is the module's real "new project" route for firms that quote before they start.
• copy from is the opposite: pick another project here and this one is prefilled from it. It is covered under the action family below, because it carries more than you might expect.

Our example starts with code PRJ-0007, Name1 تشطيب عيادة الرياض, customer C-0042.

Project Details

This block is the contract in fields. It is shared with the quotation and the project template, so it will look familiar if you have met those screens.

Field	What it is for
Project Class	a classification label for filtering and reporting
Project Type / Proj Sub Type	the work vocabulary — the sub-type lookup is narrowed by the type you chose. See project setup
Manager / Vice Manager	the two employees who own the job. They matter beyond reporting: they decide whose timesheets a manager can collect for approval, and they are always included in the project's team
From Date / To Date (editable pair)	the planned window
Planned Project Time	a number plus a unit, defaulting to months, and required
From Date / To Date (greyed pair)	the actual window. These are filled in by the system, never typed
Responsible Employee, Responsible, Mediator	the day-to-day owner, an outside responsible party, and the agent or intermediary who brought the work
Contract Total Cost, Currency, Rate	the contracted value in the deal's currency, and the rate to convert it
Contract Local Cost	the contracted value in the local currency — recomputed on every save as Contract Total Cost × Rate, so treat it as a result rather than an input
Estimated Cost	your own estimate of what the job will cost to deliver. It is informational: nothing compares it to what is actually spent

The planned window is self-balancing, which saves a lot of arithmetic. Type the From Date and a Planned Project Time, and the To Date fills itself in; type a To Date instead and the From Date is worked back from it; change the duration or its unit and the end date moves.

For the Riyadh clinic: type Interior, manager Ahmed S., planned from 01-03-2026, planned project time 6 Month — and the planned to-date arrives on its own as 01-09-2026. Contract total 900,000, currency SAR, rate 1, so on save the contract local cost reads 900,000 too.

The two date pairs

The planned dates and the actual dates carry the same English labels, and the actual pair sits directly under the planned one. The reliable way to tell them apart is that the actual pair is greyed out — the system writes it from the project's tasks: the earliest task start, and, once the completion figure reaches 100 %, the latest task end.

Recurring invoicing

Not every engagement is billed against work done. A retainer, a maintenance agreement or a fixed monthly fee is the same charge issued again and again, and the Auto Invoice block is where a project describes that arrangement once.

Auto Invoice Period sets the rhythm — a number and a unit, arriving as 1 Month on a new project. It must be at least a day.

The Auto Invoice grid below the classifications is where the charge itself is written. One row per recurring line:

Column	What it holds
Value	the amount to bill each period
Description	the wording that will appear on the invoice line
Sector, Branch, Department, Analysis Set	the dimensions the invoice line should carry

Use several rows when the retainer is billed as several lines — a fee line and a disbursements line, say — and the invoice will be built with the same breakdown.

The header Auto Invoice Value is not something you type. It is maintained by the system: on every save it is set to the total of the grid. Fill the grid and it reports that total back to you as a check; leave the grid empty and it reads zero, which is the system's way of saying this project has no recurring charge to raise.

The invoices themselves are not produced here. On the project invoice screen, Create Auto Invoices reads these lines and copies each one into an invoice line at its value — so the project holds the standing instruction, and the invoice screen carries it out when the period comes round.

For the Riyadh clinic the practice bills a monthly design fee: period 1 Month, one grid line of 150,000. On save the header Auto Invoice Value reads 150,000, and each month's invoice is raised from that single line.

Project Classes

project Class 2 through project Class 8 are seven more classification references. They exist so a firm can slice its portfolio however it likes — by funding source, by region, by partner — and they are used for filtering and reporting only.

The details matrix

Below the classes sits the Details grid: the milestone × discipline matrix, where the estimated hours and cost of every speciality in every phase are laid out. It is the hardest idea in the module and it has its own page, which walks a full 4 × 3 grid. The short version you need while reading this screen:

• you type only three things per row — the Milestone, the Discipline, and the Discipline Percentage On Milestones that says how much of that speciality's work falls in that phase;
• every cost column on the row is recalculated on save from the Disciplines page and that percentage, so anything typed into them is replaced;
• both references must already exist on the Milestones and Disciplines pages, or the save is refused.

Three buttons sit above the grid — Copy Milestones To Details, Copy Disciplines To Details and Create Matrix From Disciplines And Milestones.

These three buttons overwrite the grid

Each of them replaces the whole Details grid rather than adding to it. Any discipline percentages you have already typed are gone. Build the Milestones and Disciplines pages first, press the button once, then do your typing.

Project Status

Five read-only numbers, and a rule about them that catches everybody out. They are described under Where the numbers come from below.

Detail Accounts

A Main Account plus five numbered accounts. This is what lets a project act as a subsidiary account: create accounts of type Subsidiary whose subsidiary type is the project, put them here, and every document that costs or bills this project can land on the project's own accounts. Where a project is created from a quotation and the quotation carries no accounts of its own, these Subsidiary Accounts are taken from the template instead.

Dimensions

Legal entity, sector, branch, department and analysis set — the ordinary Nama dimensions, carried by everything the project touches.

Page 2 — Milestones

Milestones are the phases the firm plans and bills against: concept, detailed design, site supervision. This page is where a project's phases are listed, and it is more than a list — it is a generator.

Each row carries a Milestone Name, a % Of Project weight, planned Start Date and End Date, a free-text Deliveries note, a responsible employee, a % of Finishing figure, and a set of estimated-cost columns. When you save the project, every row that does not yet point at an existing milestone creates a real Project Milestone master record, filed under the master group you named in Miles Group and coded from the project's code plus the row's position when that group has no coding formula of its own. Remove a row and its generated milestone is removed with it.

For the Riyadh clinic, group MG-MILES and three rows:

Milestone name	% of project	Start	End
Concept	20	01-03-2026	01-04-2026
Detailed design	50	01-04-2026	01-07-2026
Site supervision	30	01-07-2026	01-09-2026

On save, three milestone records appear as PRJ-00070, PRJ-00071 and PRJ-00072. Those records are what the rest of the module picks up: a task is assigned to a milestone, an invoice line bills one, a project stage schedules them.

Two things about this grid are worth knowing before you type into it:

• The estimated-cost columns are results, not inputs. For any milestone that appears in the Details matrix, they are rewritten on save from the matrix rows that belong to it. The place to enter a budget is the Disciplines page.
• % of Finishing is yours to maintain. Nothing calculates it. It stays at whatever a human last typed, and it is the figure a milestone-by-milestone progress report reads.

The percentages have one rule the system does enforce: for each milestone, the matrix rows underneath it may not add up to more than that milestone's own % Of Project. That is the validation support is asked about most, and it is walked through with numbers on the matrix page.

Page 3 — Disciplines

The specialities the job needs — architecture, structure, MEP — one row each, with the % Project weight and the estimated cost of that speciality across the whole job: Direct Work Hours, Avg Cost of Hour, Indirect Costs. On save the system multiplies the first two into a direct cost and adds the indirect to reach a total.

This page is the budget's real input. The matrix on the Main page does nothing but distribute these numbers across the phases.

For the clinic:

Discipline	% of project	Direct hours	Avg cost/hour	Indirect
Architecture	60	1,200	90	20,000
MEP	40	800	110	12,000

which saves as 108,000 + 20,000 = 128,000 for architecture and 88,000 + 12,000 = 100,000 for MEP.

None of it is enforced anywhere. There is no budget check in this module: these figures inform the people reading the screen, and nothing stops a project spending five times them.

Page 4 — Tasks

A read-only list of every task that points at this project. You cannot create a task from here — this is a window, not a grid — but it is the quickest way to see the whole work breakdown of a job and open any part of it.

Page 5 — Team Work

The roster of who is allowed to work on this project.

Add one row per employee, with an optional note. On save the project quietly keeps a list of everyone entitled to book time to it: the manager, the vice manager, and every employee on this grid. That list is what the timesheet screen matches against — an employee who is not on it will not find the project or its tasks in the picker. Tick For Every One when the job is open to the whole firm and you do not want to maintain the roster.

For the clinic we add Sara M. and Khalid R., which together with Ahmed S. makes the four people whose timesheets this project will accept.

The status list

A project carries one of these:

Status	Meaning in practice
Initial	a project registered but not yet acknowledged as work
Not Started	what a new project gets automatically
In Progress	work has begun
Customer Approval	waiting on the client
On Hold	paused
Finished	delivered
Cancelled	abandoned

The status is displayed read-only in the Project Status group and changed with the Change Project Status button at the top of the Main page. Pressing it asks which status you want — Not Started, In Progress, Finished, On Hold or Customer Approval — and the answer takes effect when you save.

Three other things move it without anyone pressing the button:

• creating the project from an accepted sales quotation sets it to In Progress;
• the first timesheet booked against a project that is still Not Started moves it to In Progress;
• an invoice line can carry an Update Project Status To value, which is applied to the project when the invoice is processed.

It is a list, not a workflow

Nothing validates the order of the moves. A project can go from Finished back to Not Started, or from Not Started straight to Finished, and no rule, permission or warning stands in the way. Treat the status as a label your organisation agrees to maintain, not as a control.

Where the numbers come from

The Project Status group holds five figures that nobody types:

Field	What it is
Total Project Cost	the sum of the actual cost of the project's tasks
Total Planned Time	the sum of their planned hours
Total Actual Time	the sum of their approved actual hours
Current Finished Percentage	Total Actual Time ÷ Total Planned Time × 100, to two decimals
Project Status	the status described above

Two facts about these five decide how you read the screen.

They refresh when a task is saved, not when the project is saved. Open a project, change something, save it, and these numbers do not move — they are recalculated by the task, as part of saving it. If you are looking at a project whose figures seem stale, the fix is to open one of its tasks and save it; the totals are rebuilt from all of that project's tasks in the process. The same recalculation runs when a timesheet approval is committed, which is how approved hours find their way here in normal operation.

Total Project Cost is labour only. It is task executors' hours valued at their rates, and nothing else — expenses, purchases, stock and fixed assets never reach it, however they were recorded against the project. If you need cost against revenue, read the costing and profitability page, which is honest about which screen shows what.

The only percentage the system calculates

Current Finished Percentage is the module's one computed progress figure, and it measures hours, not delivery. A job that has burned all its planned hours reads 100 % whether or not anything has been handed over. Every other percentage on the project — the milestone % of Finishing, the discipline % OF Finished, the matrix rows' Finished Percentage — is typed in by hand, and stays exactly as typed.

By the time two tasks on the Riyadh clinic have been worked and their hours approved — 400 hours planned, 260 actual, 31,000 of actual cost — saving the second task writes Total Project Cost 31,000, Total Planned Time 400, Total Actual Time 260 and Current Finished Percentage 65.00 %, and stamps the actual start date from the earliest task. The milestone % of Finishing columns still read zero, because nobody has typed into them.

The action family

Besides the three matrix buttons already covered, the project screen carries a small family of actions for reusing work.

Repeat Project duplicates the project for a new engagement. It asks for a customer range (From Customer / To Customer by code), a Start Date, whether to copy tasks and their executors, and how much of the milestone list to bring along; the edit-screen version also lets you give the copy a name. Each copy is re-dated: the planned window starts on the date you answered and keeps the original's length, and the milestone rows shift with it so the phases stay in proportion.

Always fill in the customer range

The action duplicates the selected project once for every customer in the From/To range. Leave that range empty and it will produce one copy for every customer in the database. Name the single customer in both fields when you want a single copy.

Repeat Miles does not create a project. It appends copies of the milestone rows to the project you are already on, and can bring the last milestone's tasks onto the new one — the tool for a job that repeats the same phase, such as a retainer that runs another survey cycle each quarter. It needs at least two milestone rows to work with.

copy from, on the Basic Information group, prefills a new project from an existing one: the header, project details, accounts, currency and rate, the phases-discipline group, and all four grids — disciplines, milestones and the details matrix. The copied milestone rows arrive unlinked, so saving the new project generates its own milestone records rather than sharing the source's.

A copied project inherits the original's progress

copy from also carries the source project's Total Project Cost, Current Finished Percentage, planned and actual time and its status. A brand-new project can therefore open showing another job's numbers. They correct themselves the first time one of the new project's own tasks is saved; until then, do not read them.

Generate Invoice, in the More menu, opens a new project invoice already carrying the project's customer and pointing at this project on both sides, so the collect buttons on the invoice know what to sweep. The project must be saved first.

Setting a whole breakdown up in one step

The Main page carries a Phases Discipline Group field, and it is the fastest way to start a project that follows a house standard. Choosing a group wipes and regenerates the Milestones, Disciplines and Details grids from that group's lines — so pick it before you type anything, not after. Groups are built once for the firm and reused; the milestones and matrix page explains how to design one.

What else points at a project

Once a project exists, most of the module refers to it:

• tasks are created against it and push their cost and hours back;
• timesheets book hours to those tasks;
• expense requests and expense documents record what the job spends;
• project invoices bill it;
• procedures log the follow-ups agreed on it.