Milestones

Projects need Org plan.

A milestone is a phase of work with a start date, an end date, an owner and an allocated share of the budget. It is the unit in which a project is tracked, and the unit funders typically report against.

Milestones live on their own tab inside a project, alongside Overview, Budget, Feed, Evidence and Reports.

The milestones table — status, due date and spend against planOpen /p in the app

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Adding one

Open a project, go to Milestones, then Add Milestone. The dialog asks for:

Field	Notes
Title	Required. What this phase delivers.
Description	Optional. Displayed beneath the title in the table.
Status	Planned, Active, Completed or Cancelled. Starts at Planned.
Owner	Optional. Someone already on the project.
Starts / Due	The span. Both feed the timeline view.
Planned budget	What this phase is expected to cost, with its currency.

None of these values is permanent. A milestone can be edited or removed subsequently, unlike the project’s results planning mode, which can only be advanced.

Three views of the same milestones

The switcher on the right offers Timeline, Board and Table. Table opens by default and is the only view showing spend against plan.

• Timeline places each milestone across its start-to-due span, showing overlap and sequence.
• Board groups milestones into columns by status, for week-to-week management.
• Table lists them with status, due date and spent / planned, for financial review.

All three present the same records. No data is view-specific, so a milestone added in one view appears in all three.

The same milestones on the board — grouped by statusOpen /p in the app

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The board has one column per status, including Cancelled, which remains visible when empty so that cancelled phases are not hidden.

The same milestones on the timeline — span and overlapOpen /p in the app

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The summary counters

The summary line reads 4 total · 1 active · 1 completed · 1 overdue. Overdue is derived rather than set: it indicates that the due date has passed while the milestone is not Completed. A milestone marked Active with a past due date is counted as both active and overdue.

In the preceding screenshot, the baseline survey is Active and past its due date, so it carries an Overdue badge while remaining in the active count. This is expected rather than a data fault.

Completing one milestone is not the same as completing several

Marking a milestone Completed individually posts a system update to the project feed and notifies the project. Selecting several using the checkboxes in the Table view and setting their status collectively does neither: it changes the status and records the completion date only.

This is deliberate. Bulk editing is treated as an administrative correction rather than as reportable progress. Where several phases are genuinely being completed and the team should be notified, complete them individually.

Changing and removing milestones

Milestones can be edited without restriction, unlike the project’s results-planning mode.

Deletion is soft and clears associated tags. A deleted milestone ceases to appear while the record is retained, and its advisory tags are cleared, so anything tagged to it loses that association. Where work is being reorganised rather than removed, move it before deleting.

Milestones can be reordered. The order determines how the timeline and board present them and should be set deliberately rather than left in creation order.

Budget follows milestones

Each milestone carries a planned amount, and the Table view shows spent / planned per milestone. Expenditure is recorded on the Budget tab rather than here. Recording an expense creates the budget category automatically where one does not exist, so a chart of accounts need not be defined before the first cost is recorded.

Categories can also be defined in advance using Add Budget Category on the Budget tab, where the budget structure is set externally.

The budget: spend to date, by category, over timeOpen /p in the app

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Assigning planned amounts to categories

A category created by recording an expense has no planned amount, and the consequence extends beyond a single column. Until every category has a budget, Planned displays “No budget”, Remaining and Used are blank, and the Budget overview panel is not displayed: no total, burn rate, on-track status or allocation chart.

Expenditure continues to be tracked correctly throughout; what is absent is a basis for comparison. Set the amounts from the row menu — Edit Budget Category, then enable “give this budget category a planned amount” — and the overview appears, with totals and burn rate computed from the expenditure already recorded.

Currency is fixed per project rather than per category. Currencies cannot be mixed within one budget.

The limits of milestones

A milestone is programme structure rather than a task list. Where a phase requires several people or organisations to collaborate directly — drafting, reviewing, or dividing work — that belongs in a workspace, and a milestone can have a workspace of its own. The distinction is documented in Project or workspace?.

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