Projects

Overview

A project in Cliento represents a piece of work you deliver to a client. It groups milestones, internal tasks, files and client communication in one place — and generates a shareable portal your client can access without creating an account.

Creating a project

Go to Dashboard → Projects → New project and fill in:

• Client — select an existing client or create one inline.
• Project name — shown in the portal and on invoices.
• Description — optional, displayed in the client portal header.
• Start date — optional, for your internal planning.
• Deadline — optional, shown in the project list and portal.

Project templates Solo / Pro

Templates let you save a project structure — milestones, titles and order — and reuse it whenever you start a similar engagement. No more re-typing the same milestone list every time.

Using a template when creating a project

When creating a new project, click Use a template to pick from your saved templates or the built-in defaults. The template's milestones are pre-filled into the project instantly — you can still rename, reorder or remove them before saving.

Built-in templates

Cliento ships with six ready-to-use templates to get you started:

Creating your own template

Go to Dashboard → Templates → New template and:

1. Give the template a name.
2. Add milestones in order — each with a title and an optional position.
3. Save. The template is immediately available when creating a project.

Managing templates

From Dashboard → Templates you can:

• Edit — update the name or milestones of any template.
• Duplicate — clone a template as a starting point for a new variation.
• Delete — remove a template you no longer need. Deleting a template does not affect projects already created from it.

Project statuses

Changing status is a single click from the project page. The client portal reflects the status in real time.

Milestones

Milestones are the deliverable checkpoints of your project. Each milestone can be:

• Validated by the client (with or without payment)
• Commented on by both sides
• Linked to a payment (Solo / Pro)

Adding a milestone

Inside a project, click Add milestone and set:

• A title (e.g. "Design mockups", "Development sprint 1")
• An optional due date
• An optional amount if you bill per milestone

Milestone statuses

Auto-invoice on validation Solo / Pro

Each milestone has an Auto-invoice option. When enabled, validating the milestone automatically creates a draft invoice for that milestone's amount — no manual step required.

The auto-invoice badge is visible on the milestone card so you can tell at a glance which milestones trigger automatic billing.

See Invoices → for details on how auto-generated invoices work.

Internal tasks

Tasks are your private to-do list inside a project — they are never visible to the client. Use them to track sub-steps within a milestone.

Each task has a title and a checkbox to mark it done.

Progress bar

The progress bar shown in the project list and portal is computed automatically based on validated milestones:

progress = validated milestones / total milestones × 100

Files

Pro plan users can upload files to a project and share them via the client portal. Clients can download, validate or reject each file.

On Solo and Free plans, files uploaded by a client through the portal are still readable in the dashboard — but freelance-side upload requires Pro.

Sharing the portal

Every project has a unique token URL generated automatically:

https://cliento.dev/portal/[token]

Click Share portal on the project page to copy the link. Send it via email, WhatsApp or any channel you prefer — your client needs no account.