Help / Clients & projects

Auto-assign and pinning projects

Two small features keep the Projects area tidy as your workspace grows: an auto-assign setting that puts the right people on new projects without manual work, and personal pins that float your favorite projects to the top. One is an administrator setting for the whole team; the other is a personal preference just for you.

Auto-add people to new projects

Some people belong on nearly every project — a delivery lead, or everyone on a small team. Rather than adding them by hand each time, an administrator can set a person to join new projects automatically.

Open a person's page in Team and tick Automatically add to new projects. From then on, whenever a new project is created, that person is added to its team from the start. This is an admin-only setting on the person's profile; members cannot set it for themselves.

A few things worth knowing:

  • It applies to future projects only. Turning it on does not sweep the person onto projects that already exist — add them to those manually if needed.
  • It affects who is on the project team, which is where per-person rates and per-person budget hours are set. See project billing types for how project membership relates to rates.
  • If you migrate from Harvest, this auto-assign preference is synced across for each person, so you do not have to reset it. See migrating from Harvest.

Pin the projects you use most

Pinning is entirely personal. Your pins are yours alone — they do not change what anyone else sees, and they do not affect billing, budgets, or team membership. They simply reorder the list for your convenience.

On the Projects page, each project has a star control. Select the empty star (☆) to pin a project; select the filled star (★) to unpin it. Pinned projects gather into a ★ Pinned group at the very top of the list, so the handful you touch every day are always the first thing you see.

Your pins follow you into time entry as well. When you add a time entry, your pinned projects appear in their own ★ Pinned group in the project picker, so the projects you track against most are quick to reach without scrolling. This is especially handy if your workspace has a long project list but you personally work on only a few at a time.

Which to use

Reach for auto-assign when the question is "who should be on this project" and the answer is consistent across new work — it is an administrator's tool for staffing. Reach for pinning when the question is "which projects do I want at my fingertips" — it is your own shortcut and changes nothing for anyone else. The two work well together: an admin auto-assigns the team, and each person pins the projects they care about most.

Updated 2026-07-20. Still stuck? Contact support or return to the Help Center.