The weekly sync, without the spreadsheet
Every client, internal and volunteer project on one board, each with its stage, its health, its lead and one structured update a week. Beside it sit the sheets your team used to keep in a separate workbook, and a register of every credential a project depends on, with a warning before any of them expires.
Three things a tracking spreadsheet quietly loses
Somebody copies last week's tab, chases every lead for a line, and the file is out of date by Thursday.
A project went from green to red and back, and nobody can say who changed it or when.
The expiry date lived in one person's head, so the first warning was the outage.
One board for the weekly sync, with a history behind every cell
The Projects page lists every project you can see with its client, stage, RAG, lead, the period it runs for and its man-days, used against quota and turning amber near it and red past it. Used comes from logged time, or from a figure the project manager types in, marked manual. Client, Internal and Volunteer tabs split the board, and an organisation marked internal puts its projects under Internal.
The strip across the top counts Active, Red, Yellow and Missing this week, and each number is a filter. Search by client or project, narrow by stage, RAG or lead, or switch on Missing update to see who still owes a line. Every field change and every update is kept in the project's history with who made it and when.
- Seven stages, from Planning through Active, On hold, UAT and Maintenance to Closed or Cancelled
- Presenter hides the filters and opens every update in the order the sync reads them
- The same forms sit on the project's own Tracker tab, and the overview shows stage, RAG and lead
Projects · week of 21 Sep
| Project | Stage | RAG | This week |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project BeaconAcme Inc | Active | Green | Export fix in UAT |
| Data migrationNorthwind | UAT | Yellow | Waiting on client sign-off |
| Member portalHarbour Trust | Active | Red | No update yet |
Seven fields a week, and a nudge before the meeting
Each project carries one update per week. Pick the week's RAG, write a one-line summary, then fill in what applies: what's done, in progress, delayed or stuck, next steps, help needed and the next milestone. The RAG you give the week becomes the project's RAG, and saving again later in the week corrects it in place.
Leads of projects in Planning, Active or UAT get a push on Tuesday afternoon and again on Wednesday morning when one of theirs still has no update, and the link opens the board on that week with Missing update switched on. Step back through earlier weeks with the arrows, or write next week's early.
- Previous weeks sit under the project, each one readable in full
- An edited update opens to show what changed, field by field
- Engineers write and correct updates on their own projects; deleting one takes a project manager or above
Export fix shipped to UAT, sign-off booked for Friday
The other tabs of the workbook, typed and kept
Beside the board, keep sheets of your own: a sales pipeline, who is working on what, a volunteer roster. Columns are typed as text, long text, number, date, choice, multiple choice, person, project, checkbox or link, and choices carry a colour. Pipeline and Manpower come as ready templates.
Work in a sheet the way you work in a spreadsheet: click and type, move with the arrow keys and Tab, drag rows into order, and paste a block copied from Excel or Google Sheets to fill rows, with dates, numbers, people and projects read the way each column expects. Every cell change is kept in the sheet's history with who and when.
- Project managers and above design sheets; engineers add and edit rows
- Renaming a column keeps what was typed in it, and removing one hides it rather than erasing it
- On a phone each row becomes a card that edits the same way
Pipeline
| Client | Status | Owner | Signed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Harbour Trust | Proposal sent | Farah | Not signed |
| Northwind | Won | Abdullah |
Pasted from Excel · 2 rows added
The workbook the sync used to be, one click away
Export gives the week on screen as an Excel workbook laid out like the old tracking sheet: a sheet each for client, internal and volunteer projects, a man-days sheet with a total per client, and a legend of the stage, RAG and status words. Your own sheets follow the board's, numbers as numbers.
CSV is the same project rows in one file, with the kind of project in the first column, and every custom sheet downloads as a CSV of its own from its tab.
- Both formats export the week shown, so last week's picture is still one step back
- A column removed from a sheet stays out of the export, so the file matches the screen
Where every credential lives, and a warning before it expires
Each project has a Secrets tab, and the Secrets page lists every project's together, soonest to expire first. A secret is recorded by its facts and never its value: a name, its kind, its environment, the provider, what it is used for, where the real value is kept, the setting name the code reads, an owner, an expiry date and notes.
Warnings go out on their own: 30, 14, 7 and 1 days before the date and on the day itself, to the owner, the project's managers and its lead. From 7 days out, and once it has expired, leadership is added and everybody on the list gets an email too. Marking a secret rotated starts the clock again from its new date.
- Expiring and expired secrets are flagged on the project overview and on the dashboard
- Adding, editing, rotating and retiring each land in the project's Activity
- Clients do not see secrets at all, and there is no field for a value to be typed into
Secrets · soonest first
| Name | Env | Expires |
|---|---|---|
| Sign-in app secretClient secret | Production | Expired |
| Code host tokenToken | All | In 6 days |
| TLS certificateCertificate | Production | In 41 days |
Files, links and notes, and a task board that moves
A project's Files tab holds links and formatted notes as well as uploads, each one kept with the team or shared with the client, and every change is on the project's activity. Tasks sit on a board with a column per status: drag a card to another column to move it, and the board scrolls on its own as the card nears the edge.
- Internal projects, volunteer work and client work sit on one board, told apart by tab
- An AI agent can read the board and post the weekly update over MCP, under its user's permissions
- No client view of the board: clients follow their projects through the portal, not through the sync.
- No Gantt chart or timeline view. The board is a week at a time, with earlier weeks one step back.
- Sheets hold values, not formulas, and there is no live sync with a spreadsheet: paste in, export out.
The things teams ask about this
Does the Projects board replace our tracking spreadsheet?
That is what it was built to do. The board carries the columns a weekly tracking sheet usually has, stage, RAG, lead, period and man-days, plus one structured update per project per week, and the Excel export is laid out like the old sheet. The difference is that every change has an author and a date in the project's history, and the other tabs of the workbook can live beside it as sheets of your own.
Can an AI agent post the weekly project update?
Yes. Over MCP an agent can read the project tracker and post a week's update, and it does so under exactly the permissions of the person whose token it carries, so it can only write to the projects that person can. The update lands in the same history as one written in the browser.
Do you store our passwords and API keys?
No. The secrets register records the facts about a credential, its name, kind, environment, provider, owner, expiry and where the real value is kept, and never the value itself. There is no field for one. What it gives you is the list and the dates, so the renewal happens before anything breaks.
Who is warned before a credential expires?
The secret's owner, the project's managers and the project lead, 30, 14, 7 and 1 days before the expiry date and on the day. From 7 days out, and once it has passed, leadership is added and everybody on the list gets an email as well as the notification. Each warning is sent once, and marking the secret rotated starts the warnings again from the new date.
Can a client see the Projects board or the sheets?
No. The board, the sheets and the secrets register live in the team workspace only. Clients follow their projects through the portal's trackers, files and activity, and never see a RAG, a man-day quota or a secret.
Where this connects to the rest of it
See it against your own work
Thirty minutes on a call, one of your real client projects on the screen, and an honest answer about whether this part of the product earns its place in how you work.
partnerships@dhcertainty.com