Getting started with ProjectPlanOS

ProjectPlanOS is organised around clients and the projects you deliver for them. Start in Clients and add a client account — this is the company you're delivering for. Each client holds its own projects, contacts and billing rollups.

With a client selected, create a project. Give it a name and a target go-live date, then choose a scheduling direction: forward (start now, see where you land) or backward (fix the go-live date and let the engine work back from it). You don't need every task yet — you can add them by hand, let the AI draft a work-breakdown from a short description, or import an existing plan (next section).

If you're moving off spreadsheets entirely, the Excel alternative overview explains what changes once your plan can reschedule itself.

Already have a plan in a spreadsheet? Open a project and use Import, then drop in your .xlsx or .csv. The import mapper auto-detects the common columns — task name, owner, duration, start date and dependencies — and shows you the mapping before anything is created, so you can correct a column it guessed wrong.

Dates are read using your workspace's date format (set from your holiday country in Settings), so 03/04 is never misread. Once imported, the tasks become fully schedulable — the same as if you'd built them in the app. Teams coming from grid tools like Smartsheet or Microsoft Project usually import once and never look back at the sheet.

Every task carries an owner type, which controls who's accountable and who can be assigned:

• Company — your team owns it. Assign it to internal members.
• Client — the client is on the hook (sign-offs, data, approvals). Assign it to client contacts.
• Individual — a specific named person owns it; the app auto-selects this the moment you add an assignee.
• Joint — shared responsibility across sides, for handovers and paired work.

Ownership isn't cosmetic: it drives who appears in the assignee picker for that task and feeds the cross-project capacity and conflict checks. Get it right early and the resource views stay meaningful.

Link tasks with dependencies (finish-to-start, with optional lag) to say “this can't begin until that finishes.” Once linked, you stop managing dates manually: move or resize one task, and the scheduling engine re-flows every downstream task and recomputes the critical path — the chain that actually determines your go-live date.

Because scheduling is automatic, your Gantt is always the real timeline, not a snapshot someone forgot to update. The critical path is highlighted so you can see, at a glance, which slips will move the finish line and which have slack. This engine is the core difference from board-first tools like Monday.com and ClickUp, where the timeline is something you maintain by hand.

The Toolbox is where the delivery artefacts live, generated from your plan rather than kept in separate documents:

• RAID log — risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies tracked against the project.
• RACI by phase — who's Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed for each phase.
• Comms plan — the cadence of client, internal and stakeholder updates.
• Document Smart-Check & e-sign-offs — AI review of uploaded documents plus recorded approvals.

Together with the Virtual PM's proactive check-ins, the Toolbox is what turns a schedule into something you can actually run a delivery from.