Clients

Group projects by the organisation they are for, and give a guest a whole client — every project of it, including the ones you add later.

A client is an organisation your team does work for: Acme, Northwind, the council. In sjTasks it is two things at once — a way to group your projects, and something you can give a guest instead of a list of projects.

A client is not a person. It has no login and takes no seat. The people from Acme who sign in are guests (or members, if they do the work), and you decide which of them get Acme.

Clients are optional twice over. A team that never needs them never sees them, and a project does not need one: most projects in most teams have none.

Turning clients on

Team Settings → Features → Clients. An admin's switch, off until a team wants it. Turning it off again hides the controls, the client pages and the client names on projects, and changes nothing else: projects keep their client, and a guest keeps what they were given.

Adding a client

With the switch on, Team Settings → Clients lists your clients. Give a new one a name, and a short key if you want to choose it — acme for Acme Corporation is made for you. The key is unique in your team and is how a link names the client.

Only admins add, rename and delete clients.

Putting a project under a client

A project has one client or none.

A new project: the create form on the Projects page has a Client menu. Pick one and it tells you who else will see the project because of it.
An existing project: open the project, Settings, and change Client.

Changing a project's client changes who can see it, so when anybody would start or stop seeing the project, sjTasks names them first and asks. Say yes and it happens; say cancel and nothing changed. When nobody's view changes, it just happens.

Giving a guest a client

This is the reason clients exist. Say Kim at Acme should follow all your Acme work — the website now, the app next month, whatever comes after.

When inviting Kim: choose Guest, then tick Acme under Or whole clients. You can tick projects as well, or instead.
Someone already on the team: Team Settings → Clients, Who has it beside Acme, choose Kim, Give access.

Kim now sees every Acme project. It stays live:

A project put under Acme later appears for Kim at once, with its tasks, files and notes.
A project moved to another client, or to none, disappears for Kim at once, unless Kim was also given that project by name.
Take Acme away from Kim and every Acme project she had only through the client goes with it.

A client can be given to guests and to members limited to their projects. Admins and team-wide members see every project already, and a field worker sees only the work assigned to them, so none of them is ever given a client.

A client's page

Clients in the top bar lists your clients, each with its projects and the open tasks across them. Open one — /clients/acme — and you see Acme in one place:

Projects: Acme's projects, as the same cards the Projects page shows.
Open tasks: the open work across them. See all opens the task list filtered to Acme.
Hours logged: the hours on Acme's projects for the period you pick, by project and by person, when your team tracks time. Full report opens the Hours logged report filtered to Acme.
Recent activity: what happened on Acme's projects in the last 30 days.

Download PDF at the top makes the page into a PDF to send or print: Acme's projects with their counts, every open task across them, and the hours for the period you picked. It shows what you can see, and only you can download it. Saved views and the standard questions says how the PDFs work.

A project's card and its page show the name of its client. On the team's screens the name opens the client's page.

Filtering by client

The task list, the Projects page and the Hours logged and Workload reports have a Client menu. Pick Acme and you see only the work of Acme's projects, including a project put under Acme later. The choice is in the address, ?client=acme, so the filtered page is a link you can send, and a saved view keeps it. A project's board and calendar are one project already, so they have no client menu.

Who sees clients

Clients are the team's own way of organising its work. Admins and team-wide members see them: the Clients page, a client's page and the Client menus. A guest never sees a client as a thing — no client list, no client page, no Client menu. Kim sees the Acme projects in her ordinary lists, exactly as if you had given them to her one by one, with Acme's name on them. She never reads the name of another client.

Deleting a client

Team Settings → Clients → Delete. Its projects stay exactly as they are, with no client. Before anything goes, sjTasks lists each person who would stop seeing projects they had through the client, and which ones, and asks you to confirm.