New to ProofHub? The first few days on any project management tool are where habits form. You’re figuring out where things live, how to set up your first project, and what to tell your team. Most help docs answer these questions one feature at a time, which is fine for finding a specific setting but doesn’t help you understand how things connect.
This article covers the 22 questions that come up most often during onboarding. Some are about setup, like creating projects, inviting people, and configuring roles. Others are about the features you’ll use daily, such as task views, communication, time tracking, and reporting. Each answer includes screenshots so you can follow along in your own account.
22 Questions new ProofHub users ask while onboarding
Here’s the list of 22 common questions that new ProofHub users ask during the first few days of their onboarding:
1. What should I do first after signing up for ProofHub as a new user?
After signing up for ProofHub, the initial onboarding process guides you through creating your first project. From there, you can start by adding your team members to the platform, adding new task lists to the project, or creating a new project entirely.
To add team members, go to People in the left menu and add users one by one or upload a CSV file. Set their roles, assign them to groups, and choose which projects they can access.
To build your first project, open it and create new task lists. Each task list follows a workflow. You can use the default workflow or create a custom one that matches how your team operates. Add tasks, assign them to team members, and set due dates.
To create a new project, click the “+” icon in the left sidebar. Name your project, add the relevant team members, and start setting up task lists inside it.
Beyond tasks, each project gives you access to discussions, files, notes, chat, and time tracking. You don’t need to configure everything on day one. Start with tasks and layer in other features as your team settles in.
2. How do I invite team members and assign roles in ProofHub?
You can invite team members from the People section in the left menu. Enter their name, email, and title, assign them a role, and add them to the relevant projects. ProofHub sends them an invite automatically.
If you have a larger team, you can skip the one-by-one process and import users in bulk using a CSV file. This saves time when onboarding entire departments or bringing on a new client team.
For roles, ProofHub gives you three predefined options: Owner, Admin, and Normal user. Owners and Admins have visibility across all projects. Normal users only see the projects they are assigned to.
If those three roles don’t fit your team structure, the Ultimate Control plan lets you create custom roles with granular permissions. You can control exactly what each role can see and do across the platform. This is useful when you’re working with external collaborators or clients who need access to specific parts of a project without seeing everything else.
You can also organize people into groups. Instead of assigning users to projects individually, you add them to a group and assign the group. When new people join the same team later, you add them to the group, and they automatically get access to all the relevant projects.
3. How do notifications and reminders work in ProofHub?
ProofHub notifies you through two channels: in-app notifications and email.
In-app notifications appear under the bell icon in the top right corner. The notification panel has two tabs. The Activities tab shows updates related to tasks, projects, and files. The Mentions tab shows only the instances where someone has directly mentioned you in a comment. This separation lets you find the notifications that need your attention without sorting through general activity.
When multiple people comment on the same task or approve the same file, ProofHub groups those into a single notification instead of sending a separate alert for each action. This keeps your notification panel manageable on busy projects.
You can also control desktop notifications separately for activity updates and chat messages. This is useful if you want real-time alerts for direct messages but prefer to check task activity on your own time.
For email, you control how often ProofHub notifies you. You can receive notifications immediately, as an hourly digest, as a four-hour digest, or turn them off entirely. You can also opt into project progress reports on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. If you want a snapshot of your upcoming work before opening the platform, enable the daily agenda email that arrives at 7:00 AM.
For reminders, ProofHub lets you set them on calendar events. When you create an event, you can set a reminder that notifies all attendees before the event starts. If you also subscribe your ProofHub calendar to Google Calendar or iCal, those reminders carry over into your existing calendar workflow. This way, you can stay on top of upcoming events without keeping ProofHub open.
4. Can ProofHub help me with team communication as well as task management in one place?
Yes, ProofHub combines both task management and team communication into one platform, so you don’t need to switch between separate apps.
For task management, you create task lists, assign tasks to team members, set due dates, add subtasks, track time, and monitor progress through list, board, table, or Gantt views. Each task has its own space for comments, file attachments, and activity history. You can mention team members directly in task comments using @mentions to loop them into a conversation tied to a specific piece of work.
For communication, ProofHub gives you three distinct options depending on the context.
- Chat is for quick, real-time conversations with individuals or groups.
- Discussions are threaded and topic-based, designed for longer conversations that need to stay organized and referenceable.
- Announcements let you broadcast updates to your entire team or specific members, useful for sharing milestones, policy changes, or priority shifts.
The value of having both in one place is that your conversations stay connected to the work they’re about. A discussion about a campaign deadline lives inside the same project as the tasks for that campaign. A comment on a task is visible to everyone assigned to it. You don’t lose context jumping between tools, and nothing gets buried in someone’s email or a separate chat thread.
You can also share files within projects and use ProofHub’s proofing tool to annotate and review creative assets. Feedback happens right on the file instead of in a disconnected message.
5. How can I organize projects for different departments and teams using ProofHub?
Create separate projects for each department, team, or function. Each project acts as a self-contained workspace with its own tasks, discussions, files, notes, and calendar. Team members added to a project only see what’s inside that project, so marketing doesn’t have to sift through engineering’s work.
To keep your project list manageable, use project categories. You can label projects by department, client, or any grouping that makes sense for your organization. When your sidebar starts filling up, categories let you filter and find the right project quickly.
For teams that run similar projects repeatedly, use project templates. Set up a project with the task lists, workflows, and structure your team uses most, save it as a template, and reuse it whenever a new project starts. This saves setup time and keeps processes consistent across the team.
To manage people efficiently across departments, organize them into groups. Instead of adding individuals to each project one by one, create a group for a department, add the relevant members, and assign the group to projects. When someone new joins the department, you add them to the group, and they automatically get access to the right projects.
6. Can ProofHub replace multiple tools for project management and collaboration?
ProofHub is built to consolidate several functions into one platform. Whether it fully replaces your existing tools depends on how specialized your needs are, but for most teams it covers the core workflows that would otherwise require separate subscriptions.
For task management, you get task lists, board views, table views, Gantt charts, custom workflows, recurring tasks, and subtasks.
For team communication, you get chat, threaded discussions, and announcements.
- For file management, you can upload, organize, and share files within projects.
- For time tracking, you can log time on tasks and generate timesheets.
- For reporting, you can create custom reports to track project progress, workloads, and team productivity.
- For review and feedback, the proofing tool lets you annotate files and approve creative assets directly inside the platform.
- For documentation, notes let you create and collaborate on internal documents within a project.
Teams that were previously using a combination of a project management app, a chat tool, a time tracker, and a file review tool can bring most of that into ProofHub.
Also, it helps financially with the flat pricing model. ProofHub charges a flat rate with no per-user fee. If you’re paying per user across multiple tools, the cost adds up fast as your team grows. With ProofHub, you add unlimited users at the same price, which makes consolidation practical for larger teams.
7. How can remote teams collaborate effectively using ProofHub?
ProofHub runs entirely in the browser and on mobile, so your team can access everything from anywhere. For remote teams, often the real challenge is staying aligned when people work across different locations, time zones, and schedules.
ProofHub helps here because every task, conversation, and file lives in one shared workspace. When someone finishes a task or leaves a comment, that progress is immediately visible to the rest of the team. Managers can open a project’s board or table view and see exactly where things stand across the team.
Each team member can set their own timezone, language, and date format in their personal settings. Deadlines and events display in local time for everyone, which reduces coordination errors across regions.
The proofing tool is particularly useful for remote design teams reviewing creative work. You annotate directly on the file, and the feedback stays attached to it.
Additionally, the Me view gives each person a single view of their tasks across all projects, organized by urgency. This helps remote team members manage their own workload independently.
8. How can I prioritize tasks and deadlines more efficiently in ProofHub?
In ProofHub, you can set due dates on tasks and assign custom labels to mark priority levels. Labels are color-coded, so high-priority work stands out across list, board, and table views.
You can take this further with custom fields. Add a priority dropdown, a status tag, or any other field your team needs to sort tasks by urgency or category. These fields show up in the table view, where you can scan an entire project’s tasks and reorder them based on what matters most.
The board view organizes tasks into columns by workflow stage. You can drag tasks between stages as they progress, which gives you a visual read on where work is piling up. If one stage has too many tasks sitting in it, that’s a signal to reprioritize or redistribute work.
If your tasks depend on each other, the Gantt chart view maps them on a timeline and shows which tasks need to finish before others can begin. You can drag tasks directly on the chart to adjust dates when priorities shift.
You can also filter any task view by stage, assignee, label, or date range. On a project with dozens of tasks, filtering down to only high-priority items due this week cuts out the noise and shows you exactly what needs attention.
For a personal view of your priorities across all projects, the Me view pulls your assigned tasks into one place, grouped by what’s overdue, due today, this week, and next week.
9. How do I break large projects into manageable tasks in ProofHub?
In ProofHub, you can organize your project work using task lists. For each project, you can create multiple task lists. Each task list further acts as a container for related tasks, so you can group them by phase, department, deliverable, or any structure that fits the project. A large product launch, for example, might have separate task lists for design, content, development, and QA.
Within each task list, you can break individual tasks into subtasks. This lets you take a broad task like “redesign landing page” and split it into specific steps that can be assigned to different people with their own due dates.
Each task list follows a unique workflow. You can define custom stages that reflect how work actually moves through your team. This gives every task in that list a clear path from start to completion.
For projects with a defined timeline, the Gantt chart view lets you lay out all your task lists and tasks across a schedule. You can set dependencies between tasks so the sequence is clear. If one task slips, you can see immediately what else is affected.
Milestones help you mark key checkpoints within the project. Instead of tracking dozens of tasks individually, milestones give you a way to measure whether the project is on track at a higher level.
10. Can I customize workflows for different types of projects in ProofHub?
In ProofHub, you can create custom workflows with stages that match how your team works. A workflow defines the stages a task moves through from start to finish. Instead of using a generic “To do, In progress, Done” setup, you can define stages specific to your process
Workflows are applied at the task list level, not the project level. This means different task lists within the same project can follow different workflows. A design task list might move through Draft, Internal Review, Client Review, and Approved. A development task list in the same project might move through Backlog, In Progress, Code Review, QA, and Deployed.
You select a workflow when you create a task list. Once set, the board view reflects those stages as columns, so you can drag tasks between them as work progresses.
You can create as many custom workflows as you need. If your organization runs different types of projects, such as client work, internal initiatives, and support operations, each can have its own set of workflows tailored to that process. Once a workflow is created, it’s reusable across any project and task list in your account.
11. How do I create a project template in ProofHub for repeat projects?
In ProofHub, you can save any existing project as a template. Set up a project with the task lists, workflows, and task structure your team uses, then save it as a template. The next time you start a similar project, you create it from the template instead of building everything from scratch.
This is useful when your team runs projects that follow the same structure repeatedly. An agency running monthly client campaigns, for example, can template the entire workflow once – task lists for strategy, content, design, review, and launch – and reuse it for every new campaign.
The template carries over the project’s structure, not its data. Task lists, tasks, subtasks, and workflows come through. Dates, assignees, and comments don’t. This gives you a clean starting point where you apply the specific details for the new project.
You can maintain multiple templates for different project types. A client onboarding template, a product release template, and an internal initiative template can all exist in your account and be selected when creating a new project
12. How do managers monitor team workload and avoid employee burnout in ProofHub?
Managers can monitor their team’s workload in ProofHub using the default workload report. It shows how tasks are distributed across team members, broken down by project. If one person is carrying significantly more tasks than others, that imbalance is visible immediately.
Additionally, you can use Timesheets to add another layer. By setting up time estimates for each task, you can compare estimated effort against actual hours logged and spot when someone’s workload is exceeding what was planned. Consistently high hours from the same people over weeks is a signal worth acting on before it turns into burnout.
The board view also helps at the project level. If a particular workflow stage is stacking up with tasks assigned to the same person, that bottleneck is visible without running a report.
From there, you can reassign tasks, adjust deadlines, or redistribute work across the team. Since all of this data lives inside the same platform where the work happens, the gap between spotting a problem and acting on it is small.
13. What reports can I generate in ProofHub to measure team productivity?
ProofHub offers three categories of reports: work reports, resource reports, and custom reports.
Work reports focus on projects. The all project report gives you a summary of every project in your account, including status distribution, categories, and task completion percentages. The project report goes deeper into a single project with a milestone roadmap, a burn-up chart tracking completed versus total tasks, overdue task lists, task distribution by labels and assignees, and time logged. The project status report lets you filter and group projects by status, category, or manager to see how things are progressing across the organization.
Resource reports focus on people. The resource report pulls up an individual’s assigned projects, tasks, milestones, and time logged across the account. The workload report shows tasks assigned to selected people for a specific time period, which is useful for spotting overloaded team members. Task completion by resource shows who finished which tasks within a chosen timeframe. Resource utilization and time utilization reports track how much time team members are logging and whether tasks are taking longer or shorter than expected.
Custom reports let you build reports around specific questions. You can create a tasks report filtered by assignee, label, project, and due status. A milestones report shows overdue, completed, and upcoming milestones across projects. A time report breaks down logged time by billable, billed, and non-billable status. The custom field report lets you plot custom fields on X and Y axes to analyze patterns across projects, such as task count by priority or cost by category.
All reports can be downloaded in PDF or CSV format, and any report can be marked as private to restrict who sees it.
14. How can I keep track of overdue tasks in ProofHub?
ProofHub flags overdue tasks automatically once their due date has passed. You can spot them across several places in the platform.
The Me view is the quickest way to see your own overdue tasks. It groups your assigned tasks by urgency, with overdue items at the top. This works across all projects, so you get a single list of everything you’re behind on.
Within any project, you can filter the task view to show only overdue items. This helps project managers quickly identify which tasks have slipped and who they’re assigned to.
The project report includes a dedicated overdue tasks section that lists every overdue task in that project in chronological order. The tasks report under custom reports extends this further. You can filter by assignee, project, and label to generate a focused list of overdue work across multiple projects at once.
For ongoing visibility, the daily agenda email sends you a summary of your upcoming and overdue tasks at 7:00 AM each day. This puts overdue items in front of you before you open the platform.
15. How do I manage urgent tasks and changing priorities?
You can mark urgent tasks using custom labels. Labels are color-coded and visible across all task views, so high-priority work stands out immediately. When priorities shift, you update the label, and the change reflects everywhere that task appears.
For more structured prioritization, custom fields let you add a priority dropdown or urgency rating to tasks. These fields show up in the table view, where you can sort and reorder tasks based on what needs attention first.
When deadlines change, the Gantt chart view lets you drag tasks to new dates directly on the timeline. If a task has dependencies, you can see immediately what else shifts as a result. This is useful when an urgent task pushes other work back, and you need to adjust the schedule quickly.
To focus on what’s urgent right now, filters let you narrow any task view by label, assignee, due date, or stage. On a busy project, filtering down to only urgent items due this week gives you a clean view of what matters most.
16. How can I see a bird’s-eye view of a project in ProofHub?
Every project has an Overview tab that serves as its dashboard. It shows a progress chart, lists overdue, current, and upcoming tasks, events, and milestones, and includes an activities timeline that tracks every action across the project in chronological order.
For a view that spans multiple projects, the All Tasks view under Everything pulls tasks from every project into one place. You can switch between list, board, and table views, and filter by assignee, due date, or status to focus on what matters. Similarly, All Activities shows every action performed across all projects, filterable by project or person.
Project statuses let you define and track where each project stands. ProofHub comes with Active and Archived as defaults, but you can create custom statuses like In Review, On Hold, or Completed. These show up in the project status report, where you can group projects by status, category, or manager to see how your portfolio is progressing at a glance.
The Gantt chart adds a timeline perspective. You can see all tasks laid out with their dependencies and dates. The baseline feature takes this further. It saves a snapshot of your original plan, and as tasks shift, a grey line shows the original dates alongside the current ones. This gives you an immediate read on how far the project has deviated from the initial schedule.
The project report consolidates all of this into a single document. It includes a milestone roadmap, a burn-up chart comparing completed work against total work, task breakdowns by assignee, label, and workflow stage, and time logged by the team. You can download it as a PDF for stakeholder updates.
17. Can ProofHub be used for time tracking and time management?
ProofHub has built-in time tracking. You can log time on any task either by entering hours manually or by starting a timer that runs while you work. Each time entry can be marked as billable, non-billable, or billed, which is useful if your team bills clients based on hours.
Time entries are organized into timesheets. You can create separate timesheets for different purposes, such as one per client or one per department, and all logged time flows into the relevant sheet automatically.
For management, the resource utilization report shows how much time each team member is spending and where it’s going. You can group the data by project, status, timesheet, or task list. The time utilization report adds another dimension by comparing actual time spent against expectations, so you can identify tasks that consistently take longer than planned and adjust your estimates going forward.
The time logged by the resource report gives you a detailed breakdown of individual time entries, useful for reviewing how long specific tasks took and comparing across team members.
All time reports can be filtered by date range, person, or project, and downloaded in PDF or CSV format for invoicing or client reporting.
18. Does ProofHub’s calendar view support a shared team calendar and an online Calendar?
Yes, ProofHub supports both a shared team calendar and online calendar syncing. Each project has its own calendar where you can add events, milestones, and tasks. Everyone assigned to the project can see the same calendar, so it functions as a shared calendar for that team.
The All Calendars view under Everything consolidates calendar items from every project into a single view. You can filter by project, type (events, milestones, or tasks), and assignee. This is useful for managers who need to see what’s happening across multiple teams and projects on the same screen.
Events support attendees, timezone settings, reminders, and recurring schedules. You can also mark events as private to limit visibility to selected attendees only.
For syncing with an external calendar, you can subscribe to the ProofHub calendar from Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or any application that supports iCal. The subscription link keeps your external calendar updated as changes happen in ProofHub. You can subscribe to a single project’s calendar or to all projects at once. If you need an offline copy, the calendar can be downloaded in iCal, CSV, or PDF format.
19. Is it possible to visualize projects in Gantt charts with ProofHub?
Yes, ProofHub has a built-in Gantt chart view for every project. It displays your task lists and tasks on a timeline, showing start dates, end dates, and durations as horizontal bars.
You can set dependencies between tasks to define which tasks need to finish before others can begin. When you drag a task to a new date, dependent tasks adjust accordingly, so you can see the downstream impact of any schedule change.
The baseline feature lets you save a snapshot of your original project plan. Once set, a grey line appears beneath each task bar showing the originally planned dates. As the project progresses and dates shift, you can compare the current schedule against the baseline to see how far the project has deviated from the initial plan.
The All Gantt view under the Everything tab pulls Gantt charts from every project into one place. This gives you a cross-project timeline view, useful when you’re managing multiple projects and need to spot scheduling conflicts or resource overlaps across them.
You can export the Gantt chart for sharing or offline use.
20. What’s the easiest way to share updates with the entire team in ProofHub?
The quickest way to share an update with your entire team is through Announcements. You create an announcement inside a project, write your update, and everyone assigned to that project sees it. You can also select specific people if the update is only relevant to part of the team. Announcements work well for one-way communication, like sharing a milestone completion, a policy change, or a shift in priorities.
If the update needs a conversation around it, a discussion is a better fit. Discussions are threaded and organized by topic, so responses stay grouped under the original post. This keeps the back-and-forth structured and easy to follow, especially when you need input or a decision from the team rather than just acknowledgment.
For quick, informal updates that don’t need to be documented or referenced later, chat lets you message individuals or groups directly.
21. How can I use ProofHub for proofing and approvals?
ProofHub has a built-in proofing tool that lets you review and approve files directly inside the platform. You upload a file to a project, open it in the proofing viewer, and use markup tools to annotate specific areas with comments. Reviewers can draw attention to exact spots on a design, document, or image rather than describing feedback in a separate message.
Each comment on a proof is tied to the specific location it was placed on. Reviewers can reply to each other’s comments in threads, so the conversation stays attached to the relevant part of the file. This keeps feedback organized, especially when multiple people are reviewing the same asset.
Once the review is complete, reviewers can approve or request changes to the file. ProofHub tracks who has approved and who hasn’t, so you can see the approval status at a glance. When a new version is uploaded, previous versions are preserved, letting you compare revisions side by side to see what changed between rounds.
Proofing works across images and PDFs. You can add proofs to tasks and discussions, which ties the review process directly to the work it belongs to.
22. How can I extract board contents (name, status) in Excel CSV format?
Switch from the board view to the table view inside your project’s tasks section. The table view displays your tasks with their details in columns, including name, status, assignee, and dates. From there, click the three dots at the top right and select the option to download as CSV. You can also choose to have the export emailed to you.
The Show fields option lets you control which fields are included in the export. If you only need task names and workflow stages, you can hide the columns you don’t need before exporting.
The All Tasks view under Everything works the same way, but across all projects. You can filter by project, assignee, or status first, then export the filtered results as a CSV. This is useful when you need a consolidated extract across multiple projects.
What are the most common mistakes new ProofHub users make?
Every team goes through a learning curve with a new tool. In ProofHub, a few setup decisions made in the first week can help you make the most of the platform. These four are the ones new teams trip on most often, and fixing them early saves time down the line.
Skipping personal preferences. ProofHub lets each user set their timezone, language, date format, and notification frequency. New users often skip this and end up seeing deadlines in the wrong timezone or getting more email notifications than they want. Spend two minutes in Settings before you start working. It saves confusion later.
Ignoring custom roles when they need them. The three default roles — Owner, Admin, and Normal user — work for many teams. But if you’re working with external clients or contractors who should only see specific parts of a project, the default roles are too broad. The Ultimate Control plan lets you create custom roles with granular permissions. Teams that need restricted access but don’t set up custom roles end up either oversharing project data or managing access through workarounds that don’t scale.
Duplicating projects instead of using templates. When a new project follows the same structure as a previous one, it’s tempting to duplicate the old project and clear out the data. The problem is that duplicated projects carry over old comments, completed tasks, and outdated dates, which creates clutter. Templates are designed for this. They carry over the structure — task lists, workflows, tasks — without the data. Set up a template once, and every new project starts clean.
Treating task lists as flat to-do lists. New users sometimes create a single task list and dump every task into it. This ignores the most useful structural layer ProofHub offers. Each task list can follow its own workflow, which means tasks in that list move through stages specific to how that type of work gets done. A project with one long task list loses this. Instead, create separate task lists grouped by function, phase, or deliverable. Each one gets its own workflow, its own board view, and its own progress tracking.
Conclusion
ProofHub is built to be usable from day one. The onboarding process sets up your first project, and most features are accessible within a few clicks from there. As your team grows and your workflows get more specific, the platform scales with you through custom workflows, roles, reports, and templates. If you get stuck at any point, ProofHub’s help docs, video tutorials, and support team are available to help you move forward.
