Teamwork.com Tutorial: Set It Up in the Right Order

Teamwork.com rewards a specific setup order, and most teams get it wrong by starting where the software suggests: creating a project. The right first move is deciding what you are going to measure, because two of Teamwork's decisions are hard to undo and both of them are made before the first project exists.

This guide takes a team that bills time from an empty account to a working setup, in the order that avoids rework. It assumes you are on the 14-day trial, which requires no card and covers the paid plans.

◆Our scorecard

3.8/5

AI 3.4/5

Real and tiered rather than a label: AI Essentials, comment summaries, a project wizard and a task builder from Basics; an AI utilization summary at Accelerate; AI smart assign and profitability forecasting at Optimize; plus an MCP server that names Claude and ChatGPT. Held back by three things the vendor states itself — two features still marked coming soon, an introductory free period with no published credit price, and two different launch dates for billing in its own material.

Value for money 3.5/5

The free tier is unusually generous for this category — Gantt, time tracking and billable flags cost nothing — and Basics at $9.99/seat/mo billed annually is competitive. But seat minimums of three and five raise the real floor above the headline, and the capabilities that justify choosing Teamwork over a cheaper general-purpose tool concentrate in Accelerate and in Optimize, which carries no published price at all.

Capability & depth 4.3/5

118 capabilities documented on the vendor's own pages, and the professional-services layer is deeper than general PM tools reach: billable rates with retrospective changes, personal and company timesheets with approval, expenses against budgets, time and financial and fixed-fee budgets, invoicing from logged time, multi-currency billing, profitability reporting, utilization targets, resource scheduling by skill and capacity placeholders. The ordinary work-management set is complete on every plan, free included.

Ease of use 3.5/5

Scored on structural evidence rather than reviewer testimony, which we do not hold for this product: one-click project import from Wrike, Asana, Basecamp, ClickUp, Trello and monday.com lowers the switching cost, and the full view set plus time tracking on the free plan means the core workflow can be tested before purchase. Against that, the complexity is concentrated where the money is — rates, budgets, retainers and utilization — and the custom-workflow cap of one on Basics and three on Accelerate forces process decisions early.

Integrations 3.9/5

150+ integrations claimed, and the ones that matter are named per tier rather than left vague: Harvest and both calendars on the free plan; HubSpot, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, Xero, QuickBooks and FreshBooks at Accelerate; Salesforce and NetSuite at Optimize. The MCP server is a current capability rather than a rebrand, and file linking from Drive, Dropbox, Box and OneDrive starts at Basics. API rate limits scale by plan, 150 to 500 requests a minute.

User sentiment 4.0/5

Four sources on file, and the spread is the signal rather than the average: 3.3 out of 5 from 69 reviews at the low end against 4.4 from 1,343 and 4.5 from 941 in the two large pools. Reads as a product that satisfies most buyers and disappoints a minority sharply. The figures come from search results rather than rendered review pages, because the major aggregators block automated reading.

Docs & learning resources 3.0/5

The raw material is better than most vendors publish — a plan comparison matrix with explicit per-tier cells, and a machine-readable pricing file served for AI agents. It is undermined by its own staleness: SAML SSO, the Optimize seat minimum, when quotes unlock and the AI billing date each get two different answers across vendor pages, and a live support article still describes plans named Deliver, Grow and Scale, which no longer exist.

Support & reliability 3.8/5

SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 stated, data residency in the US or the EU on AWS, automatic database snapshots every few seconds, an uptime goal above 99.9%, and two-factor authentication plus role-based permissions on every plan. Live chat and email support from Basics; premium support and a dedicated success manager are Enterprise only. One hard limit stated by the vendor: Single Log Out via SAML is not supported.

Weighted across the axes above (weights reflect what actually drives the decision in this category). How we score →

Before You Start: The Two Decisions That Are Hard to Undo

Decide your rate structure before you log an hour. Billable user rates arrive at Accelerate^[1], and Teamwork does let you apply rate changes retrospectively. But retrospective means recalculating history, and recalculating history is a conversation with whoever already saw the old numbers. Set rates first, then log time against them.

Decide how many distinct approval paths you need. Custom workflows cap at one on Basics and three on Accelerate, unlimited only from Optimize. This is the tightest gate in the product and the one most likely to decide your plan. Write your real paths on paper now: creative briefs, change requests, internal work, amends. If the list is four, Accelerate will not hold it.

Key takeaway — Rates before hours, and workflow count before plan choice. Everything else in Teamwork is reversible without a conversation.

## Step 1: Pick the Plan From Counters, Not Headcount

Teamwork is unusual in that team size does not select your tier. Basics has a three-seat minimum and no published maximum; Accelerate has a five-seat minimum and no published maximum. So an eight-person team can sit on either, and what moves it is features, not people.

Use these three questions instead:

Question	If yes
Do you need more than one approval path, or more than 20 client proofs a month?	Accelerate at minimum
Do you need billable rates, timesheets or invoices built from logged time?	Accelerate
Do you need to know whether a project made money — profitability, multi-currency, timesheet approval?	Optimize, which has no published price

Then apply the seat minimum rather than your headcount. Basics at three seats is $29.97 a month billed annually. Accelerate at five is $124.95. Those are the floors regardless of how small the team is.

Step 2: Import, Then Immediately Fix What Did Not Come Across

Teamwork advertises one-click project import from Wrike, Asana, Basecamp, ClickUp, Trello and monday.com. Use it. The difference between a button and a migration project is usually the difference between switching and staying.

Then expect three things to be missing, because they have no equivalent in the tools you are leaving:

• Rates, budgets and retainers. These are Teamwork-native concepts. Nothing will arrive.
• Approval routing. Your old tool's automations do not translate into Teamwork's custom workflows.
• Time history in a billable shape. Logged hours may come across; the billable flag and the rate behind it will not.

Do not backfill. Start the financial layer from the current quarter and leave history where it is. Backfilling rates across closed projects produces numbers that look authoritative and are not.

Step 3: Build the Schema Before the Projects

This is the step that makes Teamwork cheap to run, and it exploits something generous in the pricing: custom fields are unlimited on every plan, including Free Forever. So is task list templates. Project templates step from two on Free to unlimited at Basics.

Create the fields that encode what Teamwork does not model natively for your work: client code, campaign or engagement reference, channel, environment, severity, whatever your reporting actually needs to slice by. Then build one project template with the right task lists, the right fields and the right dependencies.

Every subsequent project becomes a stamp rather than a setup ritual, and the reporting layer reads your fields without extra configuration. Teams who skip this step end up with forty projects structured forty ways, and no roll-up that means anything.

Teams management arrives at Basics. Set your groups up here, because logged-versus-estimated time rolls up by team, and reporting on a squad is more useful than reporting on a name.

Step 4: Turn On Time Tracking Properly

Time tracking, time estimates and the billable flag are all on the free plan, which means you can get this right before you pay. Three settings decide whether the data is usable later.

Estimate on the task, not in your head. Planned-versus-actual and logged-versus-estimated reports both compare the estimate field to logged time. An empty estimate field makes those reports blank, and they are the two reports that catch scope creep early.

Set the billable flag as a default, not a decision. Teamwork lets you mark time billable per entry. Teams that leave it to individual judgement end up reconciling at invoice time, which is the exact work the tool is supposed to remove.

Turn on reminders to log time. This arrives at Accelerate. It is a small feature with a large effect, because unlogged time is invisible cost and nobody volunteers it on a Friday.

Step 5: Wire the Intake Form, Once

Intake forms arrive at Accelerate. Build one before you build three, because the workflow count is capped and because the first form teaches you what fields you actually need.

Make the form require the things you always chase: deadline, approver, budget reference, and whatever your schema field is. A form that collects a brief but not an approver just moves the chase from email into Teamwork.

Route the form into the project structure your template already defines, so a submitted request lands as structured work rather than a task in a general list that somebody triages later.

Step 6: Set Up Client and Collaborator Access Deliberately

Client companies, a client view and collaborators exist on every plan including Free. Unlimited client users arrive at Basics.

Two things to do rather than assume:

Verify what the external person sees by looking at their screen. Rate and profitability visibility is restricted at project level, and the vendor states collaborators cannot be granted rate or budget permissions at all^[2]. That is a strong guarantee. But confirm it once with a test account, because confirming from the outside is cheaper than discovering a rate column in a client meeting.

Plan around the five-project limit. A client user can be attached to a maximum of five active projects at a time. If you run six concurrent workstreams for one client, restructure the projects rather than the relationship.

## Step 7: Connect Only What You Will Use

The integration list runs past 150, but the ones that change daily work are few. Both calendars sync on every plan, with events flowing into My Work from Accelerate. Harvest connects on Free. File linking from Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and OneDrive Personal starts at Basics; OneDrive for Business and SharePoint at Accelerate. Accounting (Xero, QuickBooks, FreshBooks) and HubSpot arrive at Accelerate. Salesforce and NetSuite are Optimize.

Webhooks arrive at Basics and are the escape hatch for anything not on the list. The named integrations do not include GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or any CI platform, so engineering connections run through webhooks and your own code.

There is also an MCP server, with Claude and ChatGPT named as supported connections, which lets an external assistant query project data directly. Worth testing in the trial; the vendor publishes no query limits.

Step 8: Decide the Reports Before the First Review Meeting

Basics carries the reports that replace a status meeting: project status, project and portfolio health, burndown, planned-versus-actual, and logged-versus-estimated per project and per user. Build the portfolio-health view and point leadership at it rather than assembling a weekly summary.

Accelerate adds budget insights, invoice status and an expense summary. Dashboards are on every plan; sharing them with people who do not have seats arrives at Accelerate.

Scheduled reports arrive weekly without anyone running them. They are Optimize, together with custom reports and advanced dashboards. If a report nobody has to remember is the habit you want, that is behind the unpriced tier.

Step 9: Spend the Automation Budget Deliberately

Automation actions are account-level monthly allowances, not per-seat quotas: 100 a month on Free Forever, 5,000 on Basics, 20,000 on Accelerate, 100,000 on Optimize and Enterprise. A twelve-person team on Basics shares 5,000 between them rather than getting 60,000.

That changes how you build. A rule that fires on every task status change across a busy account is expensive; a rule that fires on project completion is not. Start with the handful that remove recurring human work: status notifications, assignment on intake, reminders. Measure for a month before adding more. If you are comparing against a tool that meters per seat, convert the numbers before concluding anything about which is more generous.

Step 10: Set Up Security Before Someone Asks You To

Two-factor authentication and role-based permissions are on every plan, including Free, so turn 2FA on during setup rather than after an incident. Data residency is chosen between the US and the EU, hosted on AWS. Get that right at account creation, because moving it later is not a settings change.

The pieces that take longer are in the Advanced Security add-on: IP-based network access policy, email-domain restriction on invitations, and configurable automatic session logout at 30 minutes, 45 minutes, one hour or two hours. Setting up the IP and domain rules is not a toggle. The vendor's documented route is emailing its security team. If a client contract or an internal review requires those controls, start that conversation in week one rather than the week the questionnaire arrives.

Two answers to have ready. SAML single sign-on appears as an Enterprise feature in the plan comparison matrix and as part of this add-on on any paid per-user subscription in the knowledge base, which are two different bills for the same requirement. And the vendor states explicitly that the add-on does not support Single Log Out via SAML, so signing out of Teamwork leaves the identity-provider session open.

Step 11: Write Down What Expires

Two things in your setup have end dates, and both belong in a note somewhere a future you will read.

The AI is free for now. The vendor states AI is included in all paid plans "for an introductory period", with usage-based credits launching later: November 2026 on the pricing page, September 2026 in its own machine-readable pricing file. The credit price is published nowhere. If your workflow comes to depend on the AI project wizard, summaries or smart assign, that is an unknown line item on next year's budget.

Annual terms are prepaid and run the full term. There is no mid-term exit; the vendor's stated route is to decline renewal before the next annual billing date. Monthly billing has no commitment but costs 29% more on Basics and 17% more on Accelerate.

Changes are asymmetric in the usual direction: upgrades and added users take effect immediately, while downgrades and removed users take effect at the next billing cycle or at renewal.

A Realistic First Week

Day one. Start the trial, import from your old tool, and create custom fields and one project template. Do not create real projects yet.

Day two. Set billable rates. Build your groups in Teams. Stamp the template into two real projects and check that the fields appear where your reports will read them.

Day three. Turn on time tracking with estimates, set the billable default, and log a real day. Then open planned-versus-actual and confirm it says something.

Day four. Build one intake form and route it. Submit a request as an outsider would and watch where it lands.

Day five. Invite one external collaborator to a project with a budget on it, and verify from their screen that the budget is invisible.

Day six. Run a proof cycle with real creative, counting rounds against the 20-a-month Basics cap.

Day seven. Generate one invoice from logged time. That chain either fits how you bill or it does not, and this is the fifteen minutes that tells you.

Then, before the trial ends, ask sales three questions in writing: what Optimize costs at your seat count, which plan SAML single sign-on sits on, given that the plan matrix says Enterprise and the knowledge base says any paid plan via an add-on, and when AI credits start billing.