Creating and managing projects in Monograph is easy! This article will guide you through the process of setting up new projects, including defining budgets, adding phases, and assigning team members.

🚨 Admins and users with both "Edit all projects" and "Create projects" permissions can create and edit projects in Monograph.

To create a new project, navigate to Projects in the main menu and click New project in the upper right corner. From there, choose how the project should be created:

After selecting the method to build the project, click Next and enter the following information. Depending on the method selected, additional information may be requested, which is outlined in each of the applicable articles above.

Once finished, click Create to create the project and view the project's Budget page. This is where you'll add phases, budgets, and team members.

After creating the project, the Firm Services page will appear, which can be found by clicking on a project and then clicking on Budget in the sub-menu. Here, you can add the project's phases, budgets, roles, and rates. This is also where the Service Fee and Total Project Fees live.

Use the Select a phase dropdown or type to search and select phases. Global phases can be edited, added, or removed within Settings > Phase Types.

For each phase, provide the following details:

After all of the phase-specific details have been added, if you haven't already, click the Save button for each phase. Otherwise, the information will not save.

Phases with a $0.00 budget cannot have team members assigned. If a team member needs to be added to such a phase, you must first assign a budget to it.

To add team members to phases click Show Assigned Team to expand the phase. Use the + Assign Team Member dropdown to add a team member.

If a default role is assigned to the team member, it will auto-populate. If a different role or billable rate should be used in that phase for the team member than what is associated with the Default Role, click on the purple Edit icon next to the rate to edit it for only that phase.

If a team member does not have a Default Role assigned when they're added to a phase, a pop-up will appear asking for the role and billable rate that should be used. After selecting the role and rate, click Assign Team Member to save.

After adding the necessary team members to a phase, type in the forecasted hours that each team member will work on that phase. This can either be typed in as a total number of hours, or a percentage that will calculate the hours based on the phase's budget and billable rate.

Once hours have been assigned to a team member on the Project Budget page, these hours will be used to automatically generate allocations in Staffing Availability. These hours will be generated based on the total hours that were assigned to the team members in the phase and the number of days within the phase.

If a team member will work in all phases of the project, click on the icon with the three dots and select Assign to all phases to automatically add the team member to each phase with the same role and billable rate. The hours will still need to be entered for each phase.

If a team member needs to be removed from a phase, select Change team member to change the assignment and keep the rate and role, or select Delete to remove the assignment, rate, and role altogether.

Once all phases and team members are added, click Next to move on to the Consultants Fees page.

As your team is assigned billable rates, it will affect how the project's Budget looks and works, especially if any changes are made. Let's start with how it looks when a team member is added to the budget page without a default role or billable rate assigned!

To add billable rates to a team member within the Project Budget, click the Assign team member dropdown and select the team member needed for this phase.

Once this individual has been selected, a pop-up window will appear to assign this user a role and billable rate. Once this is done, click on "Assign team member".

As soon as the billable rate is assigned to a user, it will then display either a single dollar circle or two dollar circles next to the individual's billable rate to indicate whether this is a Standard Billable Rate or the Last Effective Rate, respectively.

In the example below, a single billable rate is being utilized for Danielle's role by the single dollar circle shown. When hovering over the dollar symbol, a tooltip will appear to show that the billable rate is coming from the standard billable rate in use.

On the other hand, if a billable rate with multiple rates is used, it will affect how the Firm Services budget works when the time comes for the rate to update. For reference, the last effective rate, displayed by the overlapping dollar symbols, is when a billable rate has been selected with billable rates that will change mid-phase in the project, therefore using the last effective rate from the rate when the change occurs.

When hovering over the overlapping dollar symbols, such as below, it will display which billable rates are in use and when the next rate will be effective.

Besides editing a billable rate while it's being referenced in a firm services budget page, there are two other types of updates that could affect the budget page indirectly:

For information on how to adjust project budgets, including phase and consultant budgets, see the How to Modify an Existing Project article.

You've finished creating your project - now what? Next, add any Consultants and add any additional project Details to ensure that the project is fully setup.