Projects: Boards, Gantt Timelines, and Deliverables Clients Approve

Why generic project tools fail agencies

A product team's board is honest by default, because everyone looking at it works there. An agency board is not, because half the interested parties are outside the company. So agencies do one of two things: invite clients into the internal board and immediately start self-censoring, or keep clients out and rebuild progress by hand in a weekly email.

Both are expensive. The first one turns your board into a performance, which makes it useless for planning. The second means someone spends Friday afternoons translating a task list into prose, and the client still asks “where are we?” on Monday. We wrote about that treadmill in how to stop chasing project status updates.

There is also a vocabulary problem. Most tools give you one status field, so “blocked waiting on the client's copy” and “we are two weeks late” both become “In Progress”. Those need different responses, and if the board cannot tell them apart, nobody acts on either.

What Arpixa Projects is

Arpixa Projects is delivery management with the client built in. The Projects hub has four tabs: All Projects, Timeline, Deliverables, and Briefs. The first is your working view, the second is the Gantt across everything, the third is every item waiting on client review, and the fourth is the briefs clients have sent you.

The pipeline has six stages, and the distinctions matter:

• New — received, not yet picked up.
• In Progress — actively being worked on.
• Pending — waiting on the client, or otherwise blocked.
• Delayed — behind schedule and needs attention.
• Completed — delivered and approved.
• Cancelled — the client cancelled or the scope was dropped.

Archiving is separate from all of that. An archived project drops off the board rather than occupying a column, and the archive view groups completed work by month.

What you can do with projects

Board, list, and timeline

Board is the drag-and-drop view. Columns follow the six stages, each with a count, and for anyone with financial access a value total for the column. You can bulk-select, and archive a whole column of completed work in one action.

List is for scanning and editing. Group by status or by client, collapse groups, and edit client name, project name, amount paid, and start date inline. For people with financial access the list shows revenue, expense, and profit per project, where profit is what the client paid minus the cost of the people assigned. Projects created by a client through their portal are badged, so you know where a row came from.

Timeline is a genuine Gantt: a sticky project column on the left, month and day axes, weekly gridlines, a live today marker with a jump button, and Week, Month, or Quarter zoom. Bars run from start date to deadline; a project with no deadline gets a short dashed estimate bar marked as an estimate rather than being hidden. Rows group by pipeline stage, and clicking a bar opens the project.

Inside a project, the workspace tabs are Board, Deliverables, Milestones, Timeline, and, for those with financial access, Profitability. The task board runs Backlog, To Do, In Progress, Review, Done, with drag-and-drop, priorities from Low to Urgent, comments, and a progress percentage derived from how many tasks are Done rather than a number someone typed.

Deliverables and client approval

This is where agency projects differ most from product projects: the work has to be formally accepted by someone outside the team.

You submit a deliverable with a title, an asset type — design file, PDF document, video, link, or other — either an uploaded file or a URL, and a message for the client. It sits as Awaiting Client. The client is notified, and in their portal they either approve it or request revisions, in both cases with written feedback, and a revision request also carries a priority.

When you resubmit, the previous file is kept as a version and the item returns to review with a version badge. That is the part that saves arguments: the third round of a logo is visibly the third round, with the feedback that produced it attached, rather than a file called logo-final-v3-actual.png in a chat thread. More on the workflow in how to share deliverables with clients.

The Deliverables tab in the Projects hub gives you every item across every project that is waiting on a client, which is usually the shortest useful list in the workspace.

Time, budget, and who sees the numbers

A floating time tracker follows you around the workspace. Start, pause, resume, and save time with a description, a project, and a billable or non-billable flag; the timer survives a page reload, so a closed tab does not lose your afternoon. Entries can be submitted as a weekly timesheet and approved or rejected, which matters when contractors bill you for their hours.

Each project's Profitability tab holds the project budget, tracked time, burned cost, and a budget burndown bar with the most recent tracked entries listed underneath. It only appears for people whose role grants financial access — the same gate that hides money columns on lists and boards. See Members for how those permissions work.

Team scoping runs on the same model. Someone on the Member role sees only the projects assigned to them, and the assignments are managed in bulk from the team table.

How it connects to the rest of Arpixa

• Every project belongs to a client record in your CRM, and appears on that client's Projects tab with inline editing.
• Project deadlines and milestones show up automatically on the agency calendar.
• Deliverable uploads and project assets live in Files and count against workspace storage.
• Clients follow progress in the branded client portal, or through a per-project share link.
• Briefs clients submit arrive in the same hub — see Docs & Briefs.
• Analytics reports completion rate by month, work distribution by stage, and team utilisation from tracked time.

Arpixa has a real Free plan (not a trial), with Starter at $12/month, Pro at $29/month, and Advanced at $89/month. Free includes up to 50 projects; Starter, Pro, and Advanced are unlimited. Annual billing lowers the effective monthly cost, and the pricing page is the source of truth for current plan limits.

How to run a project

1. Create a project, or start it from a template so the milestones are already in place.
2. Set the pipeline status, and set the separate client-facing status field on the workspace.
3. Break the work into tasks on the Backlog, To Do, In Progress, Review, and Done board.
4. Add milestones with due dates so they appear on the timeline and the calendar.
5. Submit deliverables for client review and act on approvals or revision requests.
6. Share the project portal link so the client can follow progress without a status email.

Related reading: how to manage multiple client projects at once and milestone tracking for client work.

Frequently asked questions