Every job you do for a client in Xota is a project. It's the folder where your bookings, tasks, issues, documents, and the client brief all live side by side.
A single company can have many projects running in parallel — a refurb, a maintenance contract, a one-off deep clean — each with its own dates, its own bookings, and its own audit trail.
🎥 Watch the walkthrough:
Where projects live
From the sidebar, click Projects. Three tabs organise your work:
-
Active — jobs in flight right now.
-
Not Started — jobs booked for the future that haven't kicked off yet.
-
Completed — jobs that have finished.
Xota decides which bucket a project goes in automatically, based on its start and end dates — there's no Mark Complete button. More on that below.
Adding a project
Hit Add Project in the top-right. The form is short:
-
Client (required) — the company this project is for. Pick from your existing Companies.
-
Project Name (required) — a short, scannable label (e.g. "Bristol HQ Refurbishment").
-
Description — what the team is walking into when they see this project on their phone.
-
Start Date (required) — defaults to today. For future jobs, pick the day it kicks off.
-
End Date — optional. Toggle Set if you've got a fixed delivery, or leave it as Open-ended if the finish date is flexible.
-
Brief — the long-form notes. Access times, site contact, materials you've promised, quirks of the building. Whoever opens the project later sees this at a glance.
If you've configured any custom fields under Settings → Work Configuration, they'll appear on this form automatically — PO numbers, site codes, colour schemes, whatever you need to track on every project.
Hit Create Project.
Uploading brief images
Right after creating the project, Xota offers a photo upload for brief images — handy for floor plans, site snaps, colour references, or anything visual the team should see before turning up. Skip this step if you don't need it and hit Done.
You can add or remove images from the Brief tab at any point later.
Inside a project
Click the project row to open its detail page. You'll find:
-
A header with the details you entered and a status pill (Not Started / Active / Completed).
-
A row of tabs:
-
Bookings — the actual scheduled work. This is where most of the action happens.
-
Draft Bookings — bookings you've staged but not yet committed to a date.
-
Booking Templates — reusable checklists of work (e.g. a weekly office clean routine) that you can apply to any project. Covered in the Task Templates guide.
-
Issues — problems the team has hit on site.
-
Emails — a record of emails sent about this project.
-
Documents — files stored against the project.
-
Brief — the brief text and images you set up earlier.
-
Every tab has an action button in the top-right to create a new item of that type. Click Booking from the Bookings tab and you drop straight into the booking form with the client and project pre-filled.
Marking a project complete
Xota doesn't have a Mark Complete button — status is derived from the dates:
-
No start date set → Not Started.
-
Today is before the start date → Not Started.
-
Today is after the end date → Completed.
-
Otherwise → Active.
If you want to close a project early, hit Edit and set the end date to yesterday. To reopen a project that's been auto-completed, push the end date forward. That's it.
Next up
Head to Creating your first booking to schedule the first chunk of real work against this project.