Timeline: Every Deadline and Milestone in One Calendar

Where the events come from

The Timeline has no data of its own. Everything on it arrives from one of two pipes, and knowing which pipe an event came down explains most of its behaviour.

The first pipe is your projects. When the portal loads, it pulls the projects belonging to you from each agency you are connected to. A project with a due date produces one red deadline bar. Every milestone on that project that has a due date produces its own bar too. This half of the calendar is a direct reflection of the schedule your agency built in their project workspace, which is why dates move here the moment they move there.

The second pipe is published timeline events. Your agency can post a dated event straight to your timeline with a title, a description, an optional end date, a type, and even a custom colour. The portal holds a live subscription to that feed for each agency, so these appear without a page reload and update in place when they are marked complete. This is the pipe agencies use for the things that are not tasks: a launch date, a review window, a week when a stakeholder is unavailable.

One consequence worth internalising: a brand new engagement with no dated work shows an empty timeline, not a broken one. Arpixa says so plainly, with a note that your agencies will add milestones and updates as projects progress.

The seven event types, decoded

Seven types exist, each locked to a colour. Because the colour never changes meaning, you can learn the palette once and then read the grid without clicking. The table below is the reference: what each type is created from, and what it actually tells you.

The pairing that surprises people is task and milestone. Intuition says a project milestone should be blue. It is not: milestones hanging off a project are drawn cyan as tasks, and the blue milestone colour belongs to events an agency deliberately published as milestones. Practically this means a well-planned project paints your calendar cyan, and blue is reserved for the checkpoints someone chose to elevate.

Agencies can also override the fill colour on a published event. If a bar does not match any of the seven swatches above, that is why, and the type badge in the detail panel remains the reliable answer.

Two colours on one bar

A single event bar is carrying two independent pieces of information, and once you see the split it is hard to unsee.

• The fill is the event type. Red means deadline, purple means review, and so on down the table above.
• The left edge is the agency. Each connection is assigned a colour from a fixed palette of six — blue, purple, pink, emerald, amber, cyan — and that colour is painted as a narrow stripe down the side of every bar it owns.

The assignment is positional and stable for a given set of connections, so an agency keeps its stripe as you move between months. That matters for anyone who has ever tried to run two agencies from one inbox: you can look at a crowded week and separate whose deadline is whose without reading a word. The same swatch reappears beside the agency name inside the detail panel, so the mapping is always confirmable.

Two more visual rules are worth knowing. Deadlines are drawn at full strength with heavier type and a red shadow, so they win any contest for attention in a busy cell. And a completed event is rendered faded with a line through it, which turns the grid into a record of what happened as well as a plan for what is next.

Month, week, day, and drill-down

The toolbar is deliberately small: a back arrow, a Today button, a forward arrow, the month and year as a heading, and a three-way switch for Month, Week, and Day.

Month is the default and the one most clients live in, because the question it answers is the common one: what is coming. Week is useful in a heavy delivery phase where several events land on adjacent days and the month cell gets crowded. Day is where you go when you want a single date with nothing else competing for attention.

There is also a shortcut worth knowing. Clicking a date number in the month grid drops you straight into Day view for that date. It is the fastest way to interrogate a busy square, and Today always brings you back to the current month. Every event is treated as an all-day item, so nothing is hidden behind a scrollable hour column.

What the detail panel tells you

Clicking an event slides a panel in from the right and dims the calendar behind it. The panel is the same shape for every event type, which makes it fast to read once you have seen it twice. Top to bottom it carries:

• A coloured bar and a type badge in words, so you never have to remember a colour, plus a Completed badge when relevant.
• The event title as the heading.
• Agency, with the agency swatch beside the name.
• Project, when the event belongs to one.
• Date, written out in full as a weekday, month, day, and year rather than a numeric string.
• Status, on published events only, reading either Completed or In Progress.
• The description your agency wrote, when there is one.
• A View Project action at the foot of the panel when the event is tied to a project.

The date formatting is a small thing that matters more than it should. “Thursday, March 6, 2026” is much harder to misread than 03/06/2026, and misread dates are one of the most expensive small failures in client work. Clicking the backdrop or the close button returns you to the grid.

Searching instead of filtering

There is no dropdown to hide event types, and no project selector. What there is, behind an icon next to the view switcher, is a search field that slides open and filters the whole calendar as you type.

It matches three fields at once: the event title, the project name, and the agency name. That is a smaller feature than a filter panel and, for this view, a more useful one. Type a project name and the grid reduces to that project across every month. Type an agency name and you have a single-agency calendar. Type a word you know is in the title, like “handover”, and you find the date without remembering which project it belonged to.

The filter applies to the underlying event set rather than only the visible month, so a search result can be reached by paging forward from where you are. Clearing the field restores everything.

What the Timeline is not

A guide that only lists features is not much use when you are trying to decide where to click. So, plainly: the Timeline is a reading surface. It is not where you ask for anything.

• You cannot create, move, or delete an event here. Dates are set by your agency, or derive from project and milestone due dates.
• You cannot request a meeting from this view. That lives in Calendar, which has a request flow built for it.
• Invoice due dates do not appear on this grid. Those show up on the Calendar and in Invoices.
• It does not send you anything. It is a view you visit, not a notification stream.
• It shows no task boards, assignees, or internal notes. The agency’s working detail stays on the agency side.

The division is intentional. Timeline answers “when” across everything; the other modules answer “what do I do about it”. If you want the full map of which module answers which question, the client portal overview lays all twelve out side by side.

Every Arpixa tier includes the client portal. Client seats are what scale: one on the free tier, twelve on Starter at $12/month, and no ceiling on Pro at $29/month or Advanced at $89/month. The pricing page is the source of truth.

How to read your timeline in a minute

Clients who get value out of this view tend to run the same short routine rather than studying the whole grid.

1. Open Timeline from the portal sidebar. It opens on the current month with today already in view.
2. Scan for red first. Red bars are project deadlines and they are the only dates with no slack in them.
3. Scan for purple and emerald next, because those are the dates that need something from you.
4. Check the left edge of each bar to see which agency an event belongs to when you work with several.
5. Click any event to slide out its detail panel with the agency, project, full date, and description.
6. Click a date number to drop into Day view for that date, then use Today to jump back.

For agencies, the useful reframe is that the Timeline is only as good as the dates behind it. Milestones without due dates never reach the grid, and a project without a due date has no red bar. If you want the portal to carry the weight of keeping clients oriented, the dates have to exist in the project first — which is the argument we make in milestone tracking for client work and how to keep track of client deadlines.

Frequently asked questions