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Smart Board
Visualise your firm's workload with the interactive Kanban-style Smart Board.
The Smart Board is a Kanban-style view of your firm’s workload, so you can see every job’s stage at a glance instead of scrolling through a list. Open it from Smart Board in the dashboard navigation.
Jobs can be added two ways: a full Create New Job form when you want to capture everything up front, or a quick inline add when you only need a title on the board fast. Once a job exists you can edit it, move it between columns, or delete it. The board also goes a level deeper than the job itself: task badges show the individual tasks inside each card, so progress is visible without opening anything. A handful of keyboard shortcuts speed up the day to day work of moving things along.
Tabs, columns, and what the tiles are counting
The board has three tabs, each showing a live count: Jobs, Strategy Plans (jobs categorised Strategy or Operations) and Onboarding (jobs categorised Onboarding). Switching tabs re-filters what is already loaded rather than fetching again, so an edit made on one tab is reflected instantly on another. Within every tab, jobs sit in four fixed columns in a fixed order: Not Started, In Progress, In Review and Complete. They cannot be renamed, reordered, added to or removed, and there is no archive column.
Cards sort themselves rather than staying where you dropped them: overdue first, then by soonest due date, with undated jobs at the bottom and the most recently created of those listed first. The five stat tiles above the tabs (Active, Overdue, Due this week, Completed and Total fee) are calculated from whatever is currently visible, so they move as you switch tab, search or filter. They are not firm-wide totals, which matters if you are quoting one in a meeting.
One scoping rule catches people out. The Jobs tab only means every job in the firm if you are a manager or an admin. Anybody below that sees a scoped-down board on every tab, showing only the jobs assigned to them.
Two ways to add a job, and they are not equivalent
The full New Job modal captures title, client, category, delegation, due date and fee, and always lands the job in Not Started whatever else you set. The column quick-add takes a title and nothing else: the job goes straight into whichever column you clicked Add on, with the client recorded as internal, the category forced to General and the fee set to zero. That is the fast path for capturing something before you forget it, not the path for creating a properly specified engagement.
Moving a card between columns changes its status immediately, and also fires any automations your firm has configured to run on a job status change. Dropping a card back into the column it came from does nothing. If a move cannot be saved, for example because you do not have permission to change that job, the card reverts to its previous column and you see an error rather than a silent no-op.
Task badges and keyboard control
Once a job has at least one task logged against it, a small pill appears in the bottom-right of its card showing done over total, for example 3/5, and turns green only when every task is complete. A job with no tasks shows no badge. Clicking the badge opens a Tasks drawer from the right with To Do and Done columns, a progress bar and a done count, and per-task priority dots, due-date pills and assignee initials. You can move a task by dragging it between the columns or by clicking its checkbox toggle; both do exactly the same thing. Tasks added from this drawer are always created at medium priority in To Do.
The board is fully usable without a mouse. Forward slash focuses the search box, N opens the New Job modal, and Escape closes whichever of the New Job, Edit Job or Delete dialogs is open and also cancels an in-progress quick add. To move a card, focus it with Tab, press Space to pick it up, use the arrow keys to move it between columns, and press Enter to drop it. On a touchscreen, press and hold a card to pick it up.
What the board will not tell you
A board shows position, not effort. A card can sit in the same column for a fortnight because it is genuinely blocked on a client, or because nobody has opened it, and the column alone cannot distinguish the two. That is what the untouched flag after 14 days is for: it surfaces the second case so a partner can ask the question rather than discovering it at the deadline.
It also shows only what the viewer is entitled to see, which is a feature but occasionally a surprise. Two people looking at the same board can see different cards because visibility follows role, so a count quoted in a meeting is a count from one person’s vantage point rather than a firm-wide total. Use the reports for a firm-wide number and the board for the work in front of you.
What people come here to do
- Find your way around the board. The three tabs, four fixed columns, five stat tiles, the search and filter chips, and what each card shows.
- Add, edit, move or delete a job. The full modal against the quick add, dragging between columns, and what a failed move looks like.
- Track the tasks inside a job. The done-over-total badge, the Tasks drawer, and the keyboard shortcuts for the whole board.
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Things that catch people out
Quick-added jobs disappear from the Strategy and Onboarding tabs
Quick add always sets the category to General, even when you use it from the Strategy Plans or Onboarding tab. Since those tabs filter on category, the job you just added will not appear there until you open it and set the right one. Use the full New Job modal when the category matters from the start.
The filter chips are single-select
You can filter by one category or one assignee at a time, not several at once, and the search box matches job title and client name only.
The untouched icon is a nudge, not a status
A small amber alert appears on any card that has not been touched for 14 or more days and is not yet Complete, with the tooltip “Untouched 14+ days”. It changes nothing about the job itself.
The four columns are the whole board
Cancelled jobs have no column here, because the board only renders the first four statuses. If your firm uses the Cancelled status, manage those from the All Jobs table instead.
Where to go next
- Practice Management. The same jobs in table form, with recurrence, budgeted hours, bulk actions and saved views.
- Calendar & Deadlines. Where those due dates land once weekends and your region’s public holidays are taken into account.
- Integrations & Automations. A job status change is a trigger the automations rules engine can act on, and dragging a card fires it.