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Projects

What a project is in Vellum: its fields, the five statuses from New to Concluded, the typical lifecycle, and what happens when you delete it.

What is a project?

A project represents a piece of work for a client — a renovation, a permit application, a new build. Every project belongs to a company (which can be just one person) and to an office, is linked to a client, and can have a responsible employee.

Within a company, the project's identifier needs to be unique. Two projects can share an address or a client, but never the same identifier.

Fields

These are the fields you'll see when you create or edit a project:

Identifier
required
A short code, unique within your company (for example, 2026-014). It's the name the project goes by across the app.
Client
required
The client this project is for. Required.
Office
required
Which of your office branches owns this project. Required.
Project type
The project type, which defines the stages the project can go through and the expected duration of each.
Responsible
The employee responsible for the project. Optional but recommended: it shows in the project list and on the dashboard.
Address
The site address (the project's, not the client's).
Dates
Project dates, including the due date — projects past their due date show as overdue.
Description
Free-text notes about the project.

States

Every project is in one of five statuses, which your team changes as the work moves on. Stages (the steps of the project type) are only tracked while the project is Ongoing.

Lifecycle

A typical project moves through these statuses, roughly in this order — and can go back when needed (for example from Concluded to Ongoing if the client comes back with changes):

  • New — created, not started yet.
  • Missing Documentation — waiting for documents from the client.
  • Ready — ready to start.
  • Ongoing — in progress; this is when stages are recorded.
  • Concluded — delivered.

Deletion behaviour

Deleting a project removes it from the lists, but the data is kept. There's no restore inside the product: if you need a project back, contact support.

Stages and files leave the lists with the project but stay stored — and stop counting towards your plan's storage. Events that were linked to the project are kept; they stay on the calendar, just without a project association.