NextProject — Advanced project management & timesheets

Kanban · Gantt · Milestones · Budgets · Profitability · Timesheets · Capacity planning

The native Dolibarr Projects module stores projects and tasks. It does not tell you whether a project will stay within its budget, which task is blocking the delivery, who will be overloaded next week, or how many billable hours are still waiting to be invoiced. NextProject fills exactly that gap: it adds a complete management layer on top of the native projects, without ever modifying your existing data.

What the module brings

1. Kanban board

• Fully configurable columns: label, colour, order, closing column.
• Global columns or project specific ones: every team keeps its own workflow.
• Drag and drop of cards between columns, with the order inside the column being stored.
• WIP limit per column: the column switches to an alert state as soon as the limit is exceeded.
• Rich cards: priority (low, normal, high, urgent) shown as a colour band, due date, progress, consumed time, Billable / Not billable badge, Blocked badge with its reason.
• Direct access to the native Dolibarr task from every card.

2. Gantt planning with critical path

• Planning bars positioned automatically from the dates or the planned workload of the tasks.
• Progress displayed inside every bar.
• Dependencies between tasks with the four standard types: FS (finish to start), SS (start to start), FF, SF, with a lag in days.
• Critical path computation (forward and backward passes): critical tasks are shown in red, the others in blue with their slack in days.
• Circular dependency detection: a link that would create a loop is refused with an explicit message, so your plan always stays computable.
• Planned duration of the project permanently displayed.

3. Milestones

• Dated milestones with a label, a description, a progress and an amount.
• "Triggers billing" option to materialise contractual deadlines.
• Automatic health indicator: on track, at risk (due in less than 7 days with progress below 80%), late, done.
• Statuses: planned, in progress, reached, cancelled. Moving to "reached" dates and completes the milestone automatically.
• Cross-project view and per-project filtered view.

4. Weekly timesheets

• Tasks × days grid over the week, with previous / next / current week navigation.
• Flexible input: 7, 7.5, 7:30, 7h30, 90m, 45min, 1d — every notation is understood and normalised.
• Row totals, daily totals and weekly total computed live.
• Billable / not billable flag on each row.
• Complete approval workflow: draft → submitted → approved or refused with a reason, with a possible return to draft.
• Approval queue for managers, showing the billable ratio of every sheet.
• Approved time is pushed into the native Dolibarr time records, so the standard project screens stay accurate.
• First day of the week configurable (Monday or Sunday).

5. Budgets and profitability

• Several budgets per project: amount, hours and internal cost, each with its own alert threshold.
• Budget consumption in amount and in hours, with coloured progress bars and an under control / threshold reached / exceeded status.
• Internal cost computed from the hourly rates of each contributor, applied to the approved time.
• External costs taken from the supplier invoices linked to the project.
• Revenue taken from the customer invoices linked to the project.
• Work in progress: billable hours not invoiced yet, valued at the sell rate.
• Margin, margin including WIP, margin rate, effective hourly rate and billable ratio.

6. Team capacity planning

• Weekly capacity, cost rate and sell rate defined per contributor.
• Planned workload computed from the open tasks the contributor is assigned to.
• Analysis period from 1 to 12 weeks.
• Remaining availability and under-loaded / optimal / overloaded status.

7. Dashboard and widget

• Key figures: open projects, late tasks, hours recorded this week, timesheets to approve.
• Projects ranked by consumed budget.
• Upcoming milestones with their health indicator.
• Widget for the Dolibarr home page: timesheets waiting for approval.

Security and permissions

Eight separate permissions let you open exactly what each profile needs:

Financial data is protected by a dedicated permission: a project manager can drive the plan without seeing the margins.

Compatibility

• Dolibarr 16.0 to 21.x (validated on 21.0.2).
• PHP 7.4 to 8.3 (validated on PHP 8.2).
• Databases: MySQL 5.7+, MariaDB 10.3+, PostgreSQL 9.6+.
• Multi-company: every table carries the entity column.
• The native Projects module is required.
• No external JavaScript library: drag and drop is written in plain JavaScript, nothing is loaded from the Internet.

Installation

1. Deploy the ZIP from Setup → Modules → Deploy external module, or copy the nextproject folder into htdocs/custom/.
2. Enable NextProject in Setup → Modules/Applications.
3. Fill in the default rates in NextProject → Setup.
4. Grant the permissions to the relevant users.

Activation creates the eight tables of the module and installs five default Kanban columns. No native table is modified: disabling the module leaves your projects untouched.

Quality

• 63 automated tests and 259 assertions covering the duration parser, the critical path scheduler, the profitability engine, the workload computation, the approval workflow and the persistence of the objects.
• Code documented with PHPDoc, following the Dolibarr coding conventions.
• SQL queries systematically typed or escaped.
• Anti-CSRF tokens on every write action.
• Responsive interface, usable on a tablet.

Languages

Interface fully translated into French, English, German, Italian and Spanish.

Package content

• Installable module as a ZIP archive.
• Training manual in French (PDF).
• Technical documentation, migration guide, compatibility matrix and test report.
• Real screenshots of every feature.

Demo of the NextProject module
Login : demo
Password : demo