Projects are records for managing your work outside of sales, such as installations, onboarding, maintenance, event planning, and even internal processes, like hiring or website management. Projects help you manage tasks, and include Pipelines or Milestones to organize your work.
Here are a few things you should get familiar with before creating projects.
Categories
Categories are a way to label opportunities, projects, tasks, and files. Category is an included dropdown field in Insightly, but the values and colors of the selections can be added to, changed, and customized by an administrator. It's similar to a custom dropdown field.
You can use Categories to identify what kind of project this is - for example, Employee Onboarding, Marketing Campaign, or Account Management.
Pipelines
Pipelines can be set up by an administrator to guide your team through an established process. Completed stages are in green, the current stage is blue, and upcoming stages are in gray.
You can tie activity sets to a Pipeline to automatically create tasks and events when a stage is reached.
In-App Guide
Enjoy a step-by-step walkthrough on how to create a Project Pipeline - follow this link to log into Insightly to get started.
Milestones
For projects that have multiple teams working on different priorities, a linear Pipeline might not be the best fit. Milestones offer another way of grouping tasks.
Milestones and their due dates will be displayed in the Milestones subtab. If your project has a Pipeline applied to it, the Milestones subtab will not appear.
Layouts and fields
Insightly has powerful customization features for fitting your CRM to your business. Two of the most beneficial of these features are custom fields and Page Layouts.
When you have standardized information that doesn't fit into the fields provided with Insightly, creating a custom field places the new field right on the data-entry form.
Custom fields are administrator-created fields that can be tailored to fit your team's needs. There are 16 different types of fields to capture numbers, dates, and text. These are great to prompt your users for standard information that they should enter every time they create a record.
Page Layouts are for organizing which fields are displayed to users, who those users are, and the order the fields appear in. Use advanced permissions to restrict page layouts to only the appropriate team's profiles.
If you'd like more information, watch our video on How to Use Projects.