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Creating a Project

Who can do this

Any authenticated user in your organisation, including the Client role — project creation is not restricted to Admin/Super Admin accounts.

Where to find it

Tenant workspace: Projects → New Project.

Before you begin

Creating a project only needs a name — everything else can be added afterwards from Edit Project. Have ready, if you know them already:

  • A project number/code.
  • The type of work (New Build, Refurbishment, Fitout, Infrastructure, Maintenance, or Other).
  • How your organisation is acting on this project — see Your organisation's role on this project, below.

How to create a project

  1. Select New Project.
  2. Enter the Project Name (required).
  3. Optionally enter a Project Number / Code.
  4. Optionally choose a Project Type — the type of work (New Build, Refurbishment, Fitout, Infrastructure, Maintenance, or Other).
  5. Optionally choose Your organisation's role on this project — Main / General Contractor, Subcontractor / Specialist Contractor, Employer / Owner, Consultant, or Other — see Your organisation's role on this project, below.
  6. Select Create Project.

That's it — the project is created immediately with these four fields. The contract type/form, contract value, currency, status, dates, location, and description are all deliberately left for later: open Edit Project on the new project's Overview page whenever you're ready to fill them in (see Editing a project, below). None of them are required to start using the project, and nothing is guessed or defaulted on your behalf beyond the project's status, which starts as Active.

Project Setup: setting up from a Contract

Immediately after creating a project, SureSign opens Project Setup. From here you can:

  • Upload an agreement — if you already have the executed contract document, upload it and SureSign will analyse it using the same AI Contract Analysis available elsewhere in the platform, so you can review and confirm its extracted details on the Contract record.
  • Analyse an existing Contract — if the project already has one or more Contracts, choose one to analyse instead of uploading another.
  • Add another Contract — upload a further agreement alongside any existing ones.
  • Skip for now — continue straight to the project workspace. Skipping is a fully supported choice, not an incomplete state; you can add a Contract at any time afterwards from the project's Contracts page, or return to Project Setup later using Set up from Contract on the project's Overview page.

While an analysis runs in Setup, a staged progress bar shows what's actually happening (preparing, extracting, reviewing, structuring) with a percentage, the same as analysing a Contract from the Contracts page directly — see AI Analysis.

Uploading requires choosing a Contract Type (Main Contract, Subcontract, Consultant Appointment, or Supplier Agreement) — this is never guessed from the document. If you set Your organisation's role on this project, Setup uses it to pre-select a likely Contract Type (Main Contractor suggests Main Contract; Subcontractor suggests Subcontract; Consultant suggests Consultant Appointment) — always just a starting suggestion you can change, never enforced. A Main Contractor project can still have a Subcontract uploaded against it, and vice versa; your organisation's role and a Contract's type are two separate things, and setting one never changes the other.

AI analysis is optional throughout: if your organisation doesn't have AI features enabled, or an analysis fails, your project and Contract are both already saved regardless — you can continue to the workspace and complete everything manually. Reviewing and confirming an analysis in Setup uses exactly the same Reviewing AI Results and Confirming Analysis steps as analysing a Contract from the Contracts page directly — nothing about the Contract's own data is treated differently because it went through Setup.

Applying confirmed Contract details to your Project

Once a Contract's analysis has been confirmed, Setup offers Review Project Suggestions — a short list of Project-summary details SureSign can copy from that confirmed Contract, shown next to your Project's current value for each one:

  • Contract Value & Currency (shown and applied together, never separately — see below).
  • Commencement Date → your Project's Start Date.
  • Completion Date → your Project's Completion Date.
  • Contract Form (e.g. "JCT Design and Build 2016") → your Project's Contract Type.
  • Retention %.
  • Your Role on this Project — only offered when it isn't already set, and only when SureSign can match your organisation's name to a party named in the confirmed Contract (see below).
  • Project Location — shown as one combined suggestion (address, city, region, postcode, country together), not five separate ones. See below for how this is extracted and what happens once you apply it.

Nothing here is applied automatically. Each row shows Current Project alongside From confirmed Contract; you tick only the ones you want, then select Apply Selected. A blank Project field is ticked by default; a field that already has a different value is left unticked so nothing you've already entered is silently replaced. A row that already matches your Project is shown as already matching, with nothing to select. If a Contract has nothing suitable to offer, Setup says so plainly rather than showing an empty list as if something had gone wrong.

Contract Value and Currency are never applied separately — SureSign never assumes a Contract amount is in your Project's existing currency, and never converts between currencies. If the confirmed Contract's currency couldn't be determined, no Contract Value suggestion is offered at all rather than guessing.

Your organisation's role suggestion is based only on your organisation's name matching a specific named party in the confirmed Contract (for example, the Main Contractor or the Employer) — never on the Contract's type alone. A specialist contractor's organisation can be the Main Contractor on one project and a Subcontractor on another; uploading a Subcontract never changes an already-set Project Role, and a role suggestion is never shown once you've already set one manually.

Project Location is where the contracted works/site are physically located — SureSign is careful to distinguish this from the Employer's, Contractor's, or any consultant's own registered office or correspondence address, and never uses one of those in its place. If a Contract only gives a partial location (for example just a city and country, with no street address), SureSign shows and applies exactly that partial information rather than guessing the missing parts. If your Project's existing location already matches the confirmed Contract, it's shown as already matching; if it differs, applying it replaces the whole location with what's shown (never a partial mix of old and new), so what you see before applying is exactly what you get afterwards.

Applying Project Location updates your Project's address fields (Address, City, State/Region, Postcode, Country), and — where the address is specific enough and SureSign can confidently determine a real-world position — automatically sets the Project's map position too, so it appears correctly on the Project Map without you doing anything else. SureSign never invents a map position: a vague location (just a city, region, or country, with no street-level address) is deliberately never turned into a precise pin, and if SureSign can't confidently determine the exact position it tells you so rather than guess. In both cases you'll see a clear result after applying:

  • A specific address with a confident match — "Project Location applied and map position updated."
  • A location that's too vague, or one SureSign can't confidently place — "Project Location applied. SureSign could not confidently determine the new map position, so no map pin has been set."

If your Project's address actually changes and it already had a map pin, that old pin is never left in place representing the wrong site — it's either replaced with a fresh, confident position, or cleared if none could be confidently determined. (If the applied location already matched your Project, nothing changes and any existing pin is left exactly as it was.)

If your Project's address already matches the confirmed Contract but has no map position yet, Project Suggestions offers a dedicated "Set map position" action for just the map pin — your address text is never touched by this action.

You can always set or correct a Project's map position yourself afterwards via Project Settings, regardless of whether it was set automatically.

This step only ever changes your Project's own summary fields. It never changes the Contract itself, never re-confirms or re-analyses it, and never creates or links an Employer/Client record. You can select Continue Without Applying at any point and complete these fields manually via Edit Project instead.

Your organisation's role on this project

Tell SureSign how your organisation is acting on this project. This can differ between projects — the same organisation might be the Main Contractor on one project and a Subcontractor on another, and setting this on one project never changes how any other project is set up.

This is separate from, and does not affect:

  • Your SureSign account permissions — your Client/Admin/Super Admin role in SureSign is unrelated to your organisation's role on any individual project.
  • Contract parties — the Employer, Main Contractor, and other named parties on your actual Contracts remain exactly as entered on each Contract; this field never rewrites them.
  • Billing, AI analysis, or commercial calculations — none of these are affected by this field.

It's optional, and left as "Role not set" until you choose one. A future release may use it to suggest details when setting up a project from an uploaded contract, but any such suggestion will always require your confirmation — it will never be set automatically.

What happens after you save

  • The project appears in your project list with the status you chose.
  • A project workspace is created with all the standard sections (Overview, Contracts, Commercial, Variations, Notices, Programme, Delay & EOT, Risk Register, RFIs, Meetings, QA Reports, Snagging, Site Reports, Toolbox Talks, Friday Packs, Delivery Documents, Closeout, Documents, Calendar, and Adjudication if enabled).
  • The project appears in relevant dashboard tiles (Active Projects) for users in your organisation.

Editing a project

Select Edit Project on the project's Overview page (next to the status badge) to complete or change everything not collected at creation:

  • Project Name and Project Number / Code.
  • Your organisation's role on this project — changeable at any time, or clearable back to "Role not set"; changing it only updates this project's own record, and never rewrites Contract parties or any other project's role.
  • A short Description.
  • Contract Type (JCT, NEC3, NEC4, FIDIC, Bespoke, or Other), Contract Value, and Currency (defaults to your organisation's currency unless you choose an explicit override).
  • Status — Active, On Hold, Completed, or Cancelled.
  • Start Date and Completion Date.
  • Project Location — Address, City, State/Region, Postcode/ZIP, Country, and geographic coordinates (Latitude/Longitude). Coordinates can be added, changed, or cleared entirely (clear both fields to remove the project from the Dashboard's Project Map).

Changes are visible on the Dashboard immediately, without needing to refresh the page.

Site Location

When a project has coordinates, its Overview page shows a Site Location section — a small embedded map centred on the project, alongside its recorded address and coordinates. This is separate from the Dashboard's organisation-wide Project Map: Site Location is about understanding one project's own surroundings (access roads, neighbouring buildings, general site context) as you start or deliver it.

From Site Location you can:

  • Open in Google Maps — opens the exact project coordinates in Google Maps in a new tab, so you can inspect satellite imagery, Street View, or directions using Google's own tools. This only sends the project's coordinates to Google when you click it — nothing happens automatically when you view the page, and no Google account or API key is required.
  • Copy coordinates — copies the latitude/longitude to your clipboard.

If no coordinates have been added yet, Site Location shows an empty state with a shortcut into Edit Project (if you have permission) rather than an empty map.

Coordinates and the recorded address are independent — SureSign does not look up or correct one from the other, so double-check both are accurate for a new project.

Common mistakes to avoid

  • Skipping the project code if your organisation relies on codes to tell similar project names apart in lists and documents.
  • Entering a completion date earlier than the start date in Edit Project — double-check both dates before saving.

What to do next