The big idea

Every person has a capacity (their working pattern, minus public holidays — your region's calendar — and booked leave). Every project places demand on people through allocations — a person, a role, and how much of their time, over a date range. The Timeline shows demand against capacity so you can see who's busy, who's free, and where work collides.

Both billable client work and internal R&D (R packages, papers, courses) are first-class — so capacity is never falsely “free”. Planners build the plan; each team member gets a personal My work view of just their part (see “Your team” below).

Timeline — the main screen

• Schedule vs Capacity. Schedule shows project-tinted blocks; Capacity shows a utilisation heatmap (green ≈ healthy, amber 90–100%, red over 100%).
• Day / Week / Month. The Zoom toggle re-buckets the whole timeline — daily detail, the weekly default, or a months-ahead overview.
• People × time or Projects × time. The People / Projects toggle flips the grid between a row per person and a row per project.
• Add / edit work. Click an empty cell in a person's row to create an assignment; click a block to edit its role, person, load, dates or billable flag, or to delete it.
• Drag to adjust. Drag a block sideways to reschedule, up/down to reassign it to another person, or drag its right edge to change duration. Changes save immediately.
• Load types. An allocation can be a % of capacity, recurring hours / month (retainer), or a fixed task hours total.
• Show on blocks. In the ⚙︎ Settings menu, switch blocks between Planned, Logged, or Planned vs logged — the last draws a fill bar (green on track, amber under, red over) and a per-person / per-project logged÷planned total. (Logged hours come from “Logging hours” below.)
• Hover for detail. With Details on hover on, hovering a block shows the assignment (role · load · dates), any leave that overlaps it (otherwise hidden behind the block), and the project's Lead / Senior / QC.
• Collapse rows. Use the ▾ chevron by a name (or Collapse all) to shrink a busy person to a single capacity strip.
• Navigate time with ‹ › or the Range presets. The stat band up top summarises free capacity, who's over 100%, unfilled placeholders and active projects.

Placeholders — unstaffed demand

+ Placeholder opens the assignment editor pre-set as an unfilled role (a “Senior — TBD”) — pick the project, role, load and dates, then save. It sits in the dashed Placeholders lane and counts toward demand. Drag a person onto it (or open it and pick a person) to staff it.

People — availability, leave & FTE over time

Click a name (in the grid or the People tab) to open their panel. There you can:

• Book leave (vacation, parental, sick, VAB) — it greys out those days and reduces capacity. Add it Approved, or as a Requested entry an approver clears later. Pending requests show a count on the Time off tab and the Team menu. The Time off tab tracks each person's allowance and balance over the Swedish vacation year.
• Change FTE over time — “Working pattern · FTE over time”, e.g. “80% from 1 Sep”. History is preserved; past dates keep their old capacity.

Projects

The Projects tab lists every project with its client, category, billable flag and the people in each role. Roles are Lead (the named expert, accountable for the work), Senior (doing the analysis), and QC — which must be independent (not someone already working on the project). Set the Lead, Senior and QC straight from the project editor.

Every project has a workspace — the plan of checkpoints, the task board, status updates and an activity feed. Staffed on a project? Click its name in My work to open the workspace and see the context around your own tasks (read-only for team members; money never appears there).

Logging hours & plan-vs-actual

Plans are estimates; logging actuals tells you how reality compared.

• Log hours. Planners use More ⋯ → Log hours (a monthly grid) or import a Clockify-style CSV; team members log their own from My work. Hours are per person · project · month.
• See the variance. On the Timeline, the Planned vs logged view overlays logged ÷ planned on every block and rolls it up per person and per project. The Dashboards utilisation bars also mark actual logged against planned.

Dashboards — the COO view

• Capacity vs demand — committed + unconfirmed demand (placeholders and soft bookings) against the capacity line; where they cross is the hiring signal.
• Billable utilisation per person against a configurable target, with actual-logged marks.
• QC coverage — billable projects missing an independent QC are flagged.
• Budget burn & margin — per-project effort against budget and fee − cost.
• Generate PDF report — a branded, confidential A4 dossier saved to your Downloads.

Your team — “My work” & roles

Lemma is multiplayer. What someone sees depends on their role:

• Admin — full access, including finance figures, people management and billing. Manager — plans and sees the whole team, approves time off, but not the billing layer. Research admin (research groups) — reads everything, including grant finances, edits nothing. Member — their own work, plus a read-only view of any project they're staffed on and the Group page as a peers view (colleagues, stages, upcoming defences).
• My work (the heart of a member's home): Assignments — accept or decline each booking (the planner sees ✓ / ✕ on the timeline), and click a project to open its workspace; Deadlines; My tasks — what's assigned to you on project boards; Hours logged — log time per project per month. My to-dos and Time off (request leave, see your balance) are their own tabs beside it.
• Booking yourself, or an approver logging their own leave, is auto-accepted — no need to approve your own.

Client portal — share, sign, bill

Your clients can have their own view: a standalone portal at /portal showing the projects they commissioned — live status, checkpoints, documents to countersign, and (if you allow it) their billing basis. Everything is produced from your live plan; they never see rates, people’s hours, margins, pipeline projects or anything belonging to another client.

• Invite a client. Open the client (Work → Clients) → Portal access: add their name and email, then send them the portal link. They sign in with their own Microsoft, Google or email account — the invited address is the match; there’s no password to manage. Revoke cuts access immediately, mid-session; Re-invite restores it.
• Share a document. On a project’s Documents tab, the Portal toggle shares that document to the client — nothing appears in the portal without this explicit step.
• Countersigning. Sign a shared document as usual (Sign & lock) — it’s held open, badged Awaiting client countersign. The client must open and read the document before the portal lets them sign (typed name + explicit consent); then it locks, and both signatures — name, date, time zone, meaning and the content fingerprint — are printed on the signature page. Reopening a signed document (admin) voids all signatures for re-approval.
• Billing view. The Billing checkbox next to a portal contact lets them see their own invoice basis for closed months (and their agreements) — line totals in the billing currency, never the per-person breakdown or rates.
• Their guide. The portal has its own “How to use” page (the ? in its top bar) written for clients — worth pointing a new contact at.

Scenarios — what-if

Create a scenario to clone the live plan into a sandbox. Edit it on the Timeline behind the amber banner, then Diff vs live and either Commit (make it the live plan) or Discard. Great for “if we win this deal” or “when the new hire starts”.

Applications & the proposal studio

The Applications tab (under Funding) is your proposal pipeline. In-flight proposals sit on a board — Drafting → Submitted → Under review — with the classic list one toggle away (your choice is remembered). Every card leads with its deadline as a calendar block, colour-stepped by urgency (red when missed, amber inside a month, brass inside two); submitted and under-review cards count down to the expected decision instead. A slim bar shows how much of the draft is written, the stat band states its denominators (“2 of 3 decided”) and names the next deadline, and filters (mine · PI · funder · year) narrow everything, stats included. Decided rows keep the one action each outcome affords — an awarded proposal opens its live grant, a rejected one offers re-apply next call (team, budget and draft carried over, dates cleared). Every researcher can run their own applications here — fellowships and travel grants included.

• Start from a live call. On first run (and behind + New application), pick a funder call — VR, ERC, Formas and more — and the call's sections, character limits and guidance are laid in the moment you create. Quick budget is the ten-minute path: a funder + a few figures → a full-cost, overhead-correct draft saved as a proposal you can refine.
• The application page reads before it edits. Overview is a summary — the facts with their countdowns, the team as chips, the budget's headline and a readiness ring of pre-submission checks; one Edit details opens the form. The lifecycle is a dated track across the top (click a stage to advance or revert), with the checks chip docked on Drafting while that's where the work is.
• Proposal studio. The Draft tab writes each section against the funder's real structure and limits, with a live counter and a whole-draft progress bar on the section rail. Insert from your live data drafts a section from what Lemma already knows — track record, team, budget; versions and per-section comments keep co-author feedback in one place; Focus hides everything but the page. Export to PDF or Word any time.
• Full-cost budget, before award. The Budget tab leads with the split that matters: full cost, then funder-covered vs university co-funding as one bar, sign-off note attached. Underneath, cost it person by person — Lemma loads salaries with employer costs (LKP) and applies each funder's overhead rule; set a duration for a per-year breakdown, download the budget PDF, and marking the proposal submitted freezes the budget as the record of what went to the funder (the draft stays editable).

Grants — funding, budgets & reporting

When an application is awarded it becomes a live grant. Open a grant (the Grants tab, or its project) for the command centre:

• Funded vs committed. Per person, the FTE the grant funds against the effort your plan actually commits — so you can see who's over-committed across grants, and the free capacity to bid for the next one.
• Funding runway & cliffs. Who falls off funding, and when — the “whose money runs out” view — plus the funder's reporting calendar (annual and final scientific/financial reports, dated and addressed) and a compliance checklist (DMP, open access / Plan S, ethics, data deposit).
• Full-cost budget. Personnel (loaded salary from the committed staffing) + operating/premises/equipment + institution overhead → full cost, and the funder-covered vs university-co-funded split, following each funder's overhead rule. Need a bespoke rate on one grant? Set a per-grant overhead override.
• Burn-down & underspend warning. Once hours are logged, the grant shows spend to date against the personnel budget, how far through the period you are, and — because many funders reclaim unspent money — an early warning if you're on track to leave funds unspent.
• Exports. An effort report (PDF/CSV), the budget PDF, and a one-click final report pack that assembles the end-of-grant reporting — final deadlines, financial position, research outputs over the grant, and deliverables — for the scientific and financial reports.
• Funders. The Funders tab is the catalog behind the pickers — each funder's overhead basis, reporting cadence and submission portal.

The doctorate — plan, thesis & supervision

A doctoral researcher's profile is a cockpit for the whole doctorate — the same view for the researcher and their supervisor:

• Development plan (ISP / TSP / IDP / TNA, per your framework) — the course/teaching/conference credit ledger against the target, with a pace hint (“23% of credits · 43% of programme time”).
• Progression — admission → seminar → half-time → dissertation. A planner can lay the whole programme out in one click with Plan the doctorate (framework-expected dates, stretched for departmental duty). The defence countdown with its back-planned checklist (nailing three weeks before, and the rest) appears in the final year.
• Thesis map — one card per planned study/paper with a hand-advanced status (designed → … → accepted), a target venue, and a link to the publication once it's real. Park a study to shelve it without losing it. Underneath: defence readiness against your group's minimums (“2 of ≥2 papers accepted ✓”). Researchers manage their own map.
• Doctoral clock & runway — net study time (gross minus duty and statutory leave), prolongation earned, the honest projected defence, whether the funding reaches it, and — once there's a year of history — “at current pace, ready to defend ~…”.
• What's left — the degree requirements as a checklist: credits, stages, papers, a documented supervision record, defence booked.
• Supervision log — the written record of meetings. Agreed actions become to-dos on the researcher's list automatically, and any to-do (or thesis study) can be flagged ⚑ raise at the next meeting — it appears as a ready-made agenda when the next meeting is logged.
• One-click paperwork — the annual review pack, a signable progress certificate (for example for a residence-permit renewal; add the permit date to a person and Lemma back-plans the application window), and a pre-filled defence application pack.

Publications, portfolio & metrics

Each researcher's profile carries their publications — added by hand, by DOI (Crossref), or found by discovery via OpenAlex — plus a portfolio of research outputs beyond papers (talks, datasets, software, awards, service). Research metrics summarise the publication trend and citations, and roll up across the group. Export a funder-format track record (VR/ERC layouts) for a grant application in a click.

Quality — controlled documents & training

The Quality tab is the organisation's controlled-document register: policies, SOPs and controlled forms, each published under a controlled code (POL-001-v1.0.0) with an owner, a review cadence and a revision history. Who must read a document is an audience rule, and the training matrix derives who has signed from it — never hand-maintained.

• Import the policies you already have. Import files takes your existing PDF and Word policies in one go — each arrives as a draft for you to review, title and publish deliberately (the Starter pack seeds common ones to edit instead). The file's text is extracted on the way in so the document becomes searchable; a scanned, image-only file uploads fine and says plainly that it can't be searched. The exact uploaded bytes stay what staff sign against, per version.
• Read and sign. Your own obligations live in My reading (and on the home screen): open the document, read it, confirm — typed name if your organisation requires it. Re-acknowledgement cycles and review dates feed the review calendar.
• The wider ledger. Quality events and actions (CAPA), the supplier and IT-system registers, the data-custody log and qualifications live on the same tab — and the audit pack and management review exports assemble the periodic paperwork from live records.
• Ask your documents. Ask a question in plain words — “what do I do about a suspected data breach?” — and the assistant answers only from your published policies, citing the document code. Imported files are part of the corpus the moment they're published.

Ask Lemma — the assistant

Ask Lemma answers questions from your live data — it reads the same org-scoped figures the screens do (workload, deadlines, projects at risk, quality status, grants and applications), so every number it quotes is current, and it can search your published policies and cite them by code. It drafts; the screens and controlled documents stay the source of truth.

It's off until an admin enables it (Settings → Assistant), answers are marked as AI-assisted, and money figures follow the same visibility rules as everywhere else — the assistant never shows anyone a number the app itself would hide from them.

Your homepage & appearance

The home screen leads with a band of number cards you choose in Settings → Homepage stats (pick up to four — a research group defaults to funding cliffs, deadlines, applications in flight and over-committed grants). Settings → Appearance switches between light, dark and match-system. Both are per person — they only change your own view.

Importing & your data

Import CSV (on the Timeline) migrates a schedule from another tool — choose the file, map the columns (Monday, Clockify, Float and Runn presets included), preview, import. People are matched by name; anyone unmatched becomes a placeholder. You can export CSV at any time, and admins can generate the PDF report.

Lemma is hosted on Microsoft Azure in the EU (Sweden Central). Each organisation's data is isolated from every other (enforced in the database), encrypted in transit and at rest, and signed in via Microsoft. See the data-handling notes for the full posture.