Projects assigned by team, department, or branch, not just by person
Most project tools give you one option: assign a task to a person. Utso’s Projects and Tasks module works at four levels instead: an individual, a team, a department, or an entire branch, because that is closer to how work actually gets handed out once a company grows past a handful of people. Every project carries its own Kanban-style task board, tasks can be grouped for a clearer view of where the workload is piling up, and every change made to a task is kept in an audit trail rather than disappearing the moment someone edits it. None of it sits in a silo either: a project can be linked straight to the CRM client it is being delivered for, and time on a project is drawn from real Attendance data rather than a self-reported timesheet. The result is one place to plan, assign, and track work, instead of a project list in one tool, a task board in another, and a spreadsheet holding the two together. It fits a company running out of a single office as easily as one running several branches, since the same four assignment levels scale with it either way.
Assignment at four levels, not one
A project can be assigned to a single employee, a whole team, a department, or an entire branch. That range matters once a company grows: a small internal project might belong to one person, while a client delivery project needs an entire department working from the same board. Utso lets each project pick the level that actually fits, instead of forcing every project into an individual-assignee model built for a five-person team. Whichever level a project is assigned at, everyone inside it works from the same board and the same task list, so a department-wide project does not end up as five different people keeping five different personal trackers for the same work.
Internal projects and client projects, tracked the same way
A project does not need an outside client to belong in the system. Internal work, an office move, a new policy rollout, a hiring push, sits in the same project list as client delivery work, tracked the same way and assigned at whichever level fits. Client projects get one extra advantage the internal ones do not need: a direct link back to the CRM record for that client, covered below. Nothing about how a project is tracked changes based on which kind it is: the same board, the same status workflow, and the same assignment options apply either way.
New hires are added automatically
When a new employee joins, they are automatically assigned to the active projects already running in their branch and department. Nobody on the HR or project management side has to remember to go back and add the new hire to work their team is already doing, it happens the moment onboarding places them in their branch and department. For a company hiring steadily, that removes one of the easiest onboarding steps to forget, especially in a branch already juggling several active projects at once.
Bringing in a project list you already have
Companies switching from a spreadsheet or another tool do not have to recreate every project by hand. Excel import brings in up to 1,000 projects in one upload, so a full project history can move over in one step instead of weeks of manual entry. That matters most in the first weeks after switching systems, when a team’s attention should be on using the new system, not on manually re-typing a project list that already existed somewhere else.
One dashboard for tasks, deadlines, and who owns them
Every project has its own dashboard showing its tasks, its deadlines, and the team responsible for it, on one screen rather than a status someone has to chase down over chat. A manager opening a project sees what is due, what is late, and who is on the hook for it, without opening a single task. It is the view built for a manager who needs the current picture of a project, not the view built for someone editing one task at a time, and it stays accurate automatically as the tasks underneath it move.
Project status at a glance
Alongside the task-level board, every project also carries its own top-level status, Ongoing or Completed, so a manager scanning a department’s full project list can tell what is still active without opening each one individually. It is a simple distinction, but it is what separates a status report someone has to compile by hand from a list that already answers the question for every project in a branch.
A Kanban board with a workflow you control
Every project gets its own task board, and the status workflow on that board is configurable rather than fixed. A software delivery project might move tasks through stages like Backlog, In Progress, Review, and Done, while a marketing project runs a completely different set of stages, both on the same underlying board. The workflow is set once per project and applies to everyone working on it, so the board reflects how that particular team actually works instead of a generic status list that does not match any real process.
Task groups show you where the workload sits
Tasks inside a project can be organized into groups or clusters, with a workload analysis run across those groups, so it is clear where work is piling up before a deadline is missed, rather than after. That is the difference between noticing an overloaded team a week before a deadline and noticing it the day after one is missed.
Bulk task import without the wait
Bringing hundreds of tasks into a project does not mean adding them one at a time. A CSV of tasks is processed through reliable background processing, so a large import lands in the project without locking up the screen while it runs. The import continues in the background, so whoever started it can keep working on the project while hundreds of rows are still being processed.
Tasks that stand on their own, or live inside a project
Not every task needs a full project wrapped around it. A task can be linked to a project when it belongs to one, or straight to a department when it does not, so a quick piece of work is never filed under an artificial project just to have somewhere to live. A department can run its own ongoing list of tasks that never becomes a formal project at all, and it is tracked with the same board and the same comment history as tasks that do.
Each employee’s own to-do list
Beyond the shared project board, every employee has a daily and weekly to-do view inside their own dashboard, pulled from the tasks assigned to them specifically. Individual accountability does not get lost inside one big shared board that only a manager tends to look at, and an employee does not have to scroll through an entire department’s project list to find what is actually theirs to do today or this week.
Every task keeps its own conversation
Each task has a threaded comment history with file attachments, so the discussion about a task, the file someone attached to it, and the decision that came out of it stay with that task permanently, instead of scattered across chat apps and email. A manager can comment directly on a task and mark it complete from the same view. That matters most months later, when someone needs to know not just what was decided on a task, but why.
Every project can trace back to the deal that created it
When a deal is marked Won in the CRM, it can be linked directly to a project. That connection means the account executive who closed the deal, the project manager delivering it, and anyone checking on progress are all looking at the same record, not a CRM entry in one tool and a project in another with no link between the two. Nobody has to manually copy a client’s name, contact details, or deal value from the CRM into a new project record, the link carries that context across automatically. Combined with branch and department-level assignment, an entire delivery team can see that client context the moment the project is created for them, rather than after someone remembers to share it separately.
Sales and delivery, reading from the same page
For a services or agency-style business, that link is what keeps what was sold and what is being delivered in sync: the project being tracked task by task on the delivery side is the same one that was scoped and closed in the CRM. It is one of the few places in Utso where closing a deal hands off directly into a different module, without anyone re-entering the same client details twice. That is what keeps a delivery team from discovering, weeks into a project, that what they are building does not quite match what sales actually promised.
Project time comes from real attendance data
Because Projects sits next to Attendance in the same platform, project-wise time analysis is built from actual clock-in and clock-out data rather than a self-reported timesheet. That gives a manager a real picture of how many hours a branch or department actually spent on a project, not an estimate filled in at the end of the week. It also means the hours reported against a project are the same hours already recorded for attendance, not a second, separate number nobody has reconciled.
Every task change is kept on record
Every change made to a task (a status move, a reassignment, an edited deadline) is kept in a full audit trail. If a client asks why a delivery date moved, or a manager wants to know who reassigned a task, the history is already there instead of being reconstructed from memory. That same record is what HR or a manager can point to if a change is ever questioned after the fact, rather than a memory of what probably happened.
No separate project tool needed. Projects and Tasks live in the same platform as HR, Attendance, and CRM, not a bolted-on integration, one login and one search instead of three.
Assignment that matches your org chart. Individual, team, department, or branch, pick whichever level actually fits the project, with no workaround needed once it outgrows one person.
Sales and delivery share one record. A deal won in the CRM can be linked straight to the project delivering it, with no re-entering the same client details twice.
BDT pricing. No USD conversion friction on your subscription.
Start your 2-month free trial and see how Projects fits the way your teams already work, from a single internal task list to a full department running a client delivery.