Running a project from setup to archive
This is the operational guide for planners. It explains what to do at each stage of a project, what the system does for you automatically, and how to handle the things that go sideways — date changes, scope changes, and cancellations. It assumes no knowledge of how the tool is built; it only covers what you need to run a meeting well.
If you remember one thing: your timeline works backward from the event date. Every deadline is calculated as event date minus a number of weeks. You almost never set a due date by hand — you set the event date, and the system dates everything else for you. When the event moves, every deadline moves with it.
A few terms you’ll see everywhere
- Template — a reusable checklist of tasks. There’s a master template (the gold standard) and a version tailored to each client. When you start a project, you clone the client’s template; you never build a timeline from scratch.
- Project — one specific meeting. It’s a live copy of a client template with a real event date and your progress tracked on it.
- Section — the vendor or work area a task belongs to (Hotel, F&B, AV, Signage, IT, Badges, Transportation, Billing, and so on). Filter by section when you’re working one area — e.g. show only AV before an AV call.
- Status — what you mark on a task: Not Started, In Progress, Blocked, Complete, or N/A. This is a fact you record.
- Health — what the system calculates from the due date and status: On Track, Due Soon, or Overdue. You never set health; it tells you where the pressure is.
- Baseline — a frozen snapshot of the original plan. The system compares your live dates against it so you (and your leads) can see how far things moved. You don’t manage this; it happens on its own at the right moment.
- Cascade — when a change to a template flows down into projects. Covered in its own section below.
The lifecycle at a glance
A project moves through five stages. The first four map onto the timeline; the fifth closes it out.
Setup → Planning → Onsite → Closeout → Archive
Setup and Planning happen before the event. Onsite is the event itself (week 0). Closeout and Archive happen after. Each stage below tells you when it starts, what you do, what the system handles, and how you know you’re ready to move on.
Stage 1 — Setup
Starts when: a meeting is confirmed and assigned to you.
What you do:
- Pick the client. This selects the correct template to clone.
- Name the meeting and enter the venue and location if you have them. If you don’t, leave them blank — they don’t block anything.
- Enter the event date. If it isn’t locked yet, enter your best target date and mark it Tentative (see below). The date is the one input the whole timeline depends on, so the project needs one even if it’s provisional.
- Assign real people to the owner roles on each task.
- Turn optional task blocks on or off for this meeting — offsite dinner, ground transportation, and anything else marked “if applicable.” Decide now which apply; you can add more later.
What the system does:
- Clones the client template into a fresh project and dates every task off the event date.
- Sets all tasks to Not Started and starts calculating health.
- Takes a light provisional baseline off your target date, so later you can see how much the plan shifted once the date firmed up.
A note on tentative dates: planning legitimately starts before the date and venue are settled — in fact the early sourcing tasks are what settle them. So a Tentative date is normal and expected. Work the early tasks against it as usual. When the date becomes real, come back and confirm it (next section). Venue is separate: it can stay “to be determined” as long as you like without holding anything up.
Done when: the event date is entered, the template is cloned, and owners are assigned.
Stage 2 — Planning
Starts when: setup is complete. This is the long middle, where most of the work lives.
What you do:
- Update each task’s status as you go: In Progress when you pick it up, Complete when it’s done, Blocked if something’s stopping you (add a note saying why), N/A if it doesn’t apply.
- Keep everything on the task itself — notes, decisions, and attachments live on the task, so the project stays consolidated in one place.
- Communicate with the client through the review-and-approval tasks as they come due.
- Run your recurring planning meetings: agenda in advance, review the timeline and working budget, send recap and action items within 24 hours.
- Confirm the event date the moment it’s locked. This is the single most important action in this stage — see “When the date changes” below.
What the system does:
- Recalculates the health of every task daily and rolls it up into a single project-level signal, so you get an at-a-glance read on whether the project is on track or in trouble.
- Keeps your dashboard and status snapshot current without you rebuilding anything — filter it by section, by owner, or to a client-facing view when you need to share.
- Flags anything overdue or coming due so nothing slips silently.
Done when: this stage doesn’t have a hard finish — it runs continuously until the event and flows naturally into Onsite as you reach week 0.
Stage 3 — Onsite
Starts when: you reach the event (week 0).
What you do:
- Work the onsite checklist: print materials, badges, tent cards, sign-in sheets, precon.
- Make sure attendees sign in, and scan the sign-in sheets. Treat sign-in as the record of who actually attended — it’s what drives honoraria and transparency reporting later, so accuracy here saves you rework in Closeout.
- You are running the event now, not planning it. Don’t rework the timeline onsite; just execute and capture.
What the system does:
- Acts as your live checklist and begins capturing actuals (attendance, on-the-ground changes) so Closeout has what it needs.
Done when: the event concludes and onsite capture is complete.
Stage 4 — Closeout
Starts when: the event is over. These are the “negative week” tasks — the timeline keeps running past the event.
What you do:
- Review and sign banquet checks; receive and pay vendor invoices (hotel, AV, ground transportation).
- Add actuals to the budget and reconcile against the plan.
- Process honoraria with the required cross-checks (contract amount vs. attendee tracker, W9/W8 verification, name matches).
- Submit transparency reporting on time. These deadlines are hard and external — transparency report due the end of the month following the meeting, honoraria within their required window, final budget into Cvent within 60 days.
- Send the final invoice to the client.
What the system does:
- Tracks which closeout tasks remain and holds the gate: the project can’t be archived until every closeout task is Complete or explicitly N/A.
- Surfaces the compliance deadlines so none of them are missed in the post-event lull.
Done when: every closeout task is Complete or N/A, the final invoice is sent, compliance reporting is submitted, and the budget is reconciled.
Stage 5 — Archive
Starts when: Closeout is fully complete.
What you do:
- Confirm the project is finished and hand off any final notes or a short lessons-learned.
What the system does:
- Freezes the project to read-only so nothing can drift, and retains the record for compliance.
- Compares what this project actually did against the client template it started from — every task you added, removed, or re-timed — and sends those differences to a review queue as suggested template improvements. Your leads decide what becomes a permanent template change. This is how the templates get smarter over time, meeting by meeting.
Done when: the project is archived. Nothing further is required of you.
When something changes
Disruption isn’t a separate stage — it can happen during any stage. In every case the system does three things: recalculates, keeps the original baseline so the change stays visible, and logs what happened and who decided it. Your job is to make the change in the tool rather than working around it, so the record stays honest.
When the date changes
Tentative date becomes real: open the project, enter the confirmed date, and mark it Confirmed. The system recalculates every deadline off the true date and freezes the official baseline at that moment — from here on, “variance” against the plan is meaningful. You’ll see the shift previewed before it commits; review it, then confirm.
A confirmed date moves (a real reschedule): change the date. Everything recalculates, and any task whose new deadline is now in the past is flagged so you can triage it. The baseline is kept, not reset, so the slip shows up as variance. Only re-baseline if a lead decides the move is so large the old plan is meaningless.
Nothing shifts behind your back — re-anchoring always shows you what’s about to move before it moves.
When scope grows (adding a section mid-planning)
If the meeting picks up a new area — say AV or an offsite dinner — pull that whole section in from the template rather than adding tasks one at a time. The system dates the new tasks off your event date and flags any that land in the past or due immediately (add AV late and some of its tasks were “due” weeks ago — you’ll see those right away). Injected tasks are counted as scope added, not as slippage, so growing the meeting won’t make your on-time numbers look bad.
When scope shrinks
If an area is cut, remove or suppress that section. Those tasks are marked out of scope, not left hanging as incomplete. Same principle: a scope cut is recorded as a scope change, not as unfinished work.
When a meeting is cancelled
Cancellation is a real path, not a delete. Mark the project Cancelled and it routes through a partial closeout: cancellation fees, deposit recovery, vendor notifications, and reconciliation of whatever was already spent. Everything you did is preserved for the record.
Cascade, in plain language
Sometimes a template changes after your project is already underway — a lead improves the client template, or the master template gets updated. Cascade is how those changes reach live projects.
What you need to know as a planner:
- Your local changes are protected. If you’ve edited a task on your project (changed its wording, moved its timing) or removed it, a template change will not overwrite your version. The system remembers that you customized it and leaves it alone. This is the single most important thing to trust: nothing you deliberately changed gets silently undone.
- Untouched tasks stay current. Tasks you haven’t customized will pick up template improvements, so your project benefits from the latest thinking without you doing anything.
- You’ll see it before it lands. A cascade into a live project is previewed — you see exactly what will change — and dates recalculate with past-due arrivals flagged, just like any other change.
- Completed work isn’t reopened. If a task you already finished gets updated at the template level, it’s flagged as “changed after you completed it” so you can judge whether rework is needed — it’s never quietly reset.
You don’t trigger cascades yourself; leads and admins do. Your job is just to review what arrives.
Reading the health snapshot
Health is calculated for you. The colors mean:
- On Track — the task is complete, or it’s incomplete with comfortable time before its due date.
- Due Soon — incomplete and coming due within the next 7 days.
- Overdue — incomplete and past its due date.
- Blocked — flagged for attention regardless of date; clear the blocker or escalate.
The project-level signal rolls these up: red if anything is overdue (or a critical task is blocked), amber if nothing’s overdue yet but something due-soon hasn’t been started or something’s blocked, green otherwise.
⚙ To confirm: the “Due Soon” window (default 7 days) and the exact rollup rules are configurable. Tune these to how your team actually works before rollout.
Who can do what
Editing rights scale with how much a change affects. Defaults:
- Planner — full control of your own projects: status, notes, attachments, local edits, injecting or suppressing sections, confirming and changing the event date. You can suggest template improvements (they flow up from your archived projects), but you don’t edit templates directly.
- Lead / Account Lead — edits the client template, approves or rejects the suggested template changes coming out of archived projects, and can cascade changes into that client’s in-progress projects.
- Admin — edits the master template, controls organization-wide cascades, and manages users and permissions.
⚙ To confirm: these tiers are a starting point. Adjust who sits where — and whether leads or only admins can cascade into live projects — before rollout.
One-glance cheat sheet
| Situation | What you do | What the system does |
|---|---|---|
| New meeting assigned | Clone client template, set event date, assign owners | Dates all tasks, takes provisional baseline |
| Date not locked yet | Enter target date, mark Tentative | Works the schedule off the target |
| Date gets confirmed | Enter real date, mark Confirmed | Recalculates, freezes the baseline |
| Confirmed date moves | Change the date | Recalculates, keeps baseline, flags past-due |
| New area added | Pull in the section | Dates new tasks as scope added, flags overdue |
| Area cut | Suppress the section | Marks tasks out of scope, not incomplete |
| Meeting cancelled | Mark Cancelled | Routes to partial closeout |
| Template changed upstream | Review the previewed cascade | Updates untouched tasks, protects your overrides |
| Task done | Mark Complete | Updates health and the project signal |
| Ready to close | Finish every closeout task | Holds the gate until all are Complete or N/A |
Defaults marked ⚙ are placeholders to confirm before this goes to the team.