Create projects, work packages, tasks, and milestones by dragging a creator bar from the panel and dropping it onto the canvas. Drop a project creator onto empty space and a green project bar appears. Drop a task creator onto the project bar and a blue task is created underneath it, automatically linked to the right parent. Timebars enforces a clean hierarchy — projects contain work packages, work packages contain tasks — without requiring you to navigate any menus.

Duplicate, delete, or bulk-move bars with right-click options. Pin a constraint onto any bar to freeze its start or finish date, overriding automatic dependency adjustments when a deadline is non-negotiable. For large project structures the spreadsheet import is faster, but the creator is always available for quick additions and adjustments during planning sessions.

Build any project structure in minutes.

Open the Resource Allocator for any task and assign one or more resources from your centralised resource pool. Timebars calculates work hours and cost automatically based on the task duration and the resource's configured rate. Allocations are visible directly on the task bar so you can see who owns what at a glance without opening any forms.

Costs and hours roll up automatically from tasks to work packages to projects, giving you real-time budget visibility at every level of the hierarchy. Adjust an allocation and the rolled-up totals update immediately — no spreadsheet required to track whether a project is heading over budget.

Assign resources and costs update themselves.

The demand grid provides a time-phased, aggregated view of resource supply versus demand across the entire portfolio. Each row represents a resource, role, skill group, or custom attribute. Each column is a time period. The cells show how much of that resource's capacity is consumed in that period — and whether supply is sufficient to meet demand.

This is the view that helps resource managers make decisions: where are the bottlenecks three months from now? Which skills are permanently over-committed? Which periods have slack that could absorb new project scope? The demand chart answers these questions in seconds rather than requiring manual consolidation of project data from multiple files.

Spot capacity bottlenecks months before they arrive.

Convert any task to a Risk or Issue by changing its sub-type in the core form. Timebars immediately applies colour-coding based on severity — critical risks appear in red on the canvas — and prefixes the label so risk items are unmistakable even in a dense project view. Each risk or issue has a full form for owner, description, mitigation steps, probability, impact, and resolution notes.

Change requests follow the same pattern: raise a change item, link it to the affected tasks, record the scope and cost impact, and document the approval decision through the FOCD form system. The full audit trail — from original baseline to approved changes to revised plan — is maintained within the tool, giving you everything you need for governance reporting.

Risk and change management on the same canvas as the plan.

The quickest way to set up a project in Timebars is through the spreadsheet template. Download it from the menu, populate the Resources tab with resource names, roles, rates, and skills, then add your work packages and tasks on the Projects tab. Drag the completed spreadsheet onto the Timebars canvas and the entire structure imports in seconds — hierarchy, resources, metadata, and all.

The same template is used for export. Pull current project data back out whenever you need an offline copy, want to share data with someone without a licence, or need to run custom analysis in Excel. Changes made in the spreadsheet can be re-imported without losing data already on the canvas. For organisations that live in spreadsheets, this is the feature that makes Timebars feel like a natural extension of existing processes rather than a replacement for them.

The bridge between the way your team works and the tool.