Managing Phases and Phase Categories

Would you like to be perfectly on time and check each step of your project? Here is how to manage your project phases!

Workspace Owners and Admins can create, manage, and edit project phases. Both Phases and Phase Categories help users to effectively organize and monitor their time throughout the entire project lifecycle.

Phases

Phases are key elements of every project as they help you to break single projects into smaller chunks. They give you a detailed project overview on the Project Status page.

Creating a new Phase for a project takes only a couple of clicks. You can do it when you create a project for the first time.

Simply open the Projects view and click the white Edit button in the top right corner.

edit phases in projects

Select the Phases tab: click Add New to create a new Phase. A new line, highlighted in green, will appear at the top of the list.

Make sure to:

  • choose a name for the new phase;

  • select the “phase category” from the drop-down menu, if available;

  • add the total Budget (in hours) for this Phase, if needed.

💡 Tips for setting up your phases

Phases break down the projects into smaller steps. They can be the actual phases of your project or the single activities you perform for that client within the project. 

Examples:

  • A project called “Marketing” can have phases like “Social Media” or “Email Marketing”, “Market Research”;
  • If you build an app, the phases can be “App 1.0”, “2.0”, and so on.

If you're unsure on what phases to create, you can use Timeneye's templates.

How to Manage a projects' Phases

From inside the Project detail page, click the Edit button in the top right corner.

edit phases

Select the Phases tab: you'll see a complete list of all the phases you have created for the current Project.

edit phases project

Here are the elements you can edit on this page:

  • the Active checkbox to see what phases are still active;

  • the Name and Category column

  • the Budget (either hourly or monetary budget): allocate and manage portions of the total budget for each phase, monitor project progress, and make sure that no phase exceeds its allocated budget.

Whenever you make a change, please remember to save it; otherwise, your changes won't be applied.

If you want to create a new phase for the current project, just click on Add new, and a new line will appear at the top of the table.

Bulk editing Phases

In addition to editing phases within individual projects, Admins and Owners can also manage phases in bulk by navigating to Projects > Manage Phases.

This will open a dialog displaying all the phases created in your workspace, along with the number of projects associated with each phase. By selecting individual phases, you can edit their names in bulk and assign categories as needed.

bulk edit phases

Phase Categories

Phase categories can be used to group and track similar phases, as well as the time logged for each phase. This helps maintain a tidy account but also provides insights into how time is allocated across various projects within related phases.

Owners can create Phase categories from the Data management section of the workspace:

phase categories

For example: phases such as "Debug," "Testing," and "Bugfix" can all fall under a single "Development" category.

By generating a report, workspace Owners can easily see how much time is spent on "Development" across all associated development-related phases and projects.

Assigning Budgets to Phases

When managing a project's budget—whether it's a monetary budget or a time budget—it's essential to allocate resources carefully. This ensures that the budget remains on track and prevents any single phase from consuming an excessive portion of the budget, leaving insufficient funds for the rest.

You can assign a portion of a total time budget, to individual phases from the Project Edit> Phases section of a project:

edit phases project (1)