The Costbars canvas gives you an immediate view of your entire project portfolio on a single timeline. Brown portfolio bars group related initiatives; green project bars sit beneath them; the small circles indicate Strategic Value and Ability to Execute. Drag projects along the timeline to adjust their scheduled start, and watch cost and resource demand figures update in real time.

Zoom in and out to move between a week-level view of active projects and a year-level view of the full pipeline. The Filter Menu lets you narrow the canvas to a specific portfolio grouping, strategic pillar, or project status — useful when the full view is dense and you need to focus on a particular subset for a review meeting.

Your entire investment pipeline in one scrollable view.

Define your own scoring criteria — strategic alignment, financial return, operational risk, regulatory compliance, or any combination — and assign a weight to each. Costbars scores every project against these criteria consistently, producing a ranked list that reflects your organisation's priorities rather than the loudest voice in the room. Scoring models are configured in the spreadsheet and can be updated as strategic priorities evolve.

Run scoring at any point in the portfolio cycle: during initial intake to filter out weak proposals, before annual planning to rank the full pipeline, or mid-year to re-evaluate in-flight projects against new strategic direction. Because the same criteria apply to every project every time, the results are defensible in governance forums and board presentations.

Data-driven prioritisation that removes the politics.

Before committing resources to a project, run it through the Costbars feasibility assessment. Score the project across four dimensions — technical risk, political risk, size, and complexity — to generate an objective feasibility score from 0 to 100. Colour-coded risk levels and tailored recommendations surface the factors most likely to cause delivery problems before a single resource is assigned.

The assessment creates a consistent, documented basis for go/no-go decisions that is independent of who is championing the project. When two competing projects have similar strategic scores, the feasibility assessment provides the tiebreaker. And because the scores are on record, you can review them retrospectively after project delivery to calibrate the model for future assessments.

Know the real risks before you say yes.

Costbars aggregates resource demand from every project in the pipeline — active, approved, and proposed — into a single time-phased demand grid. Each row shows demand for a specific resource, role, or skill group. Each column is a time period. The grid makes it immediately visible where demand exceeds supply, and by how much.

To resolve overallocation, drag projects along the pipeline timeline to shift their start dates and smooth the demand curve. Link projects with predecessor dependencies so that sequencing constraints are respected as you reschedule. The demand grid updates in real time as you move projects, so you can see the effect of each change before committing to it. This is the workflow that turns a list of approved projects into a deliverable programme.

Turn approved projects into a programme your team can actually deliver.

The tabular view provides one row per project across the entire portfolio, with configurable columns showing cost, hours, schedule, priority score, risk level, strategic alignment, and any custom metadata field you have defined. Sort by any column, apply filters to focus on a specific portfolio segment, and export for offline review or governance reporting.

The tabular view is the right tool for working meetings where you need to step through the portfolio systematically rather than navigate a visual canvas. Filter to show only projects above budget, sort by strategic score to identify the highest-priority items, or group by strategic pillar to review balance across the portfolio. It is also the starting point for the formal scoring and selection workflow.

The right view for systematic portfolio analysis.

Every task bar and milestone diamond carries a picklist that controls which reports that item appears in. Rather than including every scheduled item in every view, project managers can tag each bar precisely — selecting whether it surfaces in the local project reports, the Personal Dashboard, or the Enterprise Dashboard. This gives teams the ability to curate what stakeholders and individuals see in their reports without altering the underlying project structure, keeping dashboards focused and relevant rather than cluttered with every task in the portfolio.

The Facilities report demonstrates the power of this approach. Bars tagged for Facilities are pulled from across multiple projects and rendered together on a single Gantt chart, giving a consolidated visual of every facility booking regardless of which project raised it. A training room, a test environment, a piece of specialist equipment — any resource that is shared across project boundaries can be tracked this way, with clashes and availability visible at a glance. The report framework is extensible, so organisations can define additional report categories that match their own operational needs beyond the built-in defaults.

Tag once. Appear in exactly the right reports.

The Report Menu is your local analytics hub, bringing together every report and graph available within the application into a single organised navigation panel. Five report categories cover the full breadth of project data: General overviews for high-level summaries, Portfolio views for cross-project analysis, Project-level reports for schedule and cost detail, Task reports for granular progress tracking, and Resource reports for capacity and utilisation analysis. Each category surfaces the metrics most relevant to that level of the hierarchy, so whether you are presenting to a steering committee or drilling into an individual work package, the right view is one click away.

All reports are generated from the project data on your local canvas — no data leaves the application and no connection to an external reporting service is required. Charts and graphs update to reflect the current state of your projects, giving you analytics that are always in step with the plan rather than dependent on a scheduled export or a manual refresh. For project managers who need to communicate status quickly, the Report Menu turns the data already in the tool into presentation-ready outputs without additional effort.

Every chart, every metric, every level — one menu.

All three applications run entirely in the browser — accessed from a URL like any web page, with nothing to install, configure, or maintain on the user's machine. There is no client software to deploy, no IT ticket to raise, and no version to keep up to date. Open the link, sign in, and your full project environment is available immediately on any modern browser, on any device, without touching the operating system beneath it.

Project data is stored directly in the browser's built-in IndexedDB — a structured local database that holds your schedules, resources, and metadata entirely on the machine in front of you. Nothing is written to a shared cloud server. That means your data stays within your own environment: behind your firewall, on your hardware, under your control. For organisations with strict data governance requirements or sensitive project information, this is the architecture that makes adoption straightforward where cloud-hosted tools cannot go.

Your data stays on your machine. Always.

The built-in Help Assistant puts the entire application knowledge base at your fingertips, powered by Google Gemini. Every help article, feature guide, and workflow explanation has been integrated directly into the AI model, so when you ask a question you get an answer that is specific to this application — not a generic response drawn from the open web. Ask how to set a baseline, how to configure a custom field, or how dependencies behave when a constraint is applied, and the assistant responds with accurate, contextual guidance drawn from the same documentation the support team uses.

The assistant is available without leaving your current view, so you never lose your place in a planning session to go searching through help pages. Type a question in plain language — as you would ask a colleague — and get a direct, actionable answer in seconds. For new users getting up to speed, it replaces the need to read documentation cover to cover. For experienced users hitting an unfamiliar corner of the application, it is faster than any search index. The more specific your question, the more precise the answer.

Ask anything. Get answers from someone who knows the app.

The Bulk Update Form is available on the Publishing page and lets you apply a field change across multiple pubsets in a single operation. Choose the update mode, select the target store, define the value to apply, and confirm — the change propagates across every selected pubset immediately, without opening each one individually. Whether you are correcting a status field that was set incorrectly across a programme of projects, updating an owner after a team change, or resetting a metadata value at the end of a reporting period, bulk update turns a repetitive manual task into a single form submission.

The form is deliberately focused: one field, one value, one operation at a time. That constraint is what makes it safe to use across large numbers of pubsets without risk of unintended side effects. Select your target store carefully, preview what will be affected, and apply with confidence. For administrators managing a large project portfolio, this is the tool that keeps data consistent across the estate without requiring individual project managers to make the same change in each of their own plans.

One change. Every pubset. Done.

The Bulk Manage Bars form gives administrators and project managers the ability to manipulate project structures at scale without touching the canvas directly. Transfer bars between projects to restructure a portfolio after a reorganisation, duplicate entire work packages to use a proven task structure as the foundation for a new project, or create bars in bulk by importing structured data from JSON or CSV. Operations that would take considerable time bar-by-bar on the canvas are resolved in a single form submission.

The import path from JSON and CSV is particularly useful for organisations that generate project structures from external systems — contract management tools, bid management software, or planning templates maintained outside the application. Rather than manually recreating that structure on the canvas, feed the data directly into the form and the bars are created with hierarchy, metadata, and sequencing intact. Combined with the duplicate and transfer functions, the Bulk Manage form gives you the full toolkit for keeping a large, evolving project portfolio organised without disruptive manual rework.

Restructure, duplicate, and build at scale — not one bar at a time.

The OpenProject integration creates a live synchronisation bridge between the application and your OpenProject instance, allowing data to flow in both directions without manual export and re-import cycles. Project structures, tasks, assignments, and progress updates maintained in either system can be kept in alignment, so teams working in OpenProject and portfolio managers working in the scheduling canvas are always looking at the same underlying data. The integration is designed for organisations that run OpenProject for team-level execution while using Timebars, Agilebars, or Costbars for portfolio-level planning and reporting.

Because synchronising two live systems carries complexity, the integration is structured around two guided scenarios — Scenario A and Scenario B — that cover the most common setup patterns. Each scenario walks through the required steps in sequence, with hover instructions on every step explaining exactly what to do and why. Follow the scenario that matches your setup, work through the steps in order, and the synchronisation is configured correctly without needing to understand the underlying API mechanics. For administrators setting this up for the first time, the scenario framework removes the guesswork and gets both systems talking reliably.

Two systems, one source of truth.