Quick Start · Fundamentals · 17 tutorials

Learn ViviScape Work, from first login to full operations.

ViviScape Work runs the whole arc of service work — customers, projects, tasks, time, invoices, knowledge, and AI — in one system. Start with the 15-minute Quick Start, then work through the fundamentals one module at a time.

No workspace yet? Create a free Starter account — no credit card, and the Quick Start begins there; module tutorials require the plans shown below.

The 15-minute path

Eight steps. Real data, not a sandbox.

  • 1 Create your workspace 2 min
  • 2 Secure your account 1 min
  • 3 Set your activity types 3 min
  • 4 Add your first customer 2 min
  • 5 Create a project 2 min
  • 6 Create and assign a task 2 min
  • 7 Track your first hour 1 min
  • 8 Check Insights, invite the team 2 min
Where to start

Three ways in, depending on your day.

01

Quick Start

New to ViviScape Work and want it working today. Eight steps from sign-up to a tracked, billable hour sitting in a report.
02

Fundamentals

Seventeen short tutorials covering every core module — tasks, projects, time, customers, invoices, notes, spaces, insights, AI.
03

Build on ViviScape Work

REST API, the vs CLI, and an MCP server for AI agents. Same identity and audit trail as the web app.
Quick Start

From zero to your first tracked, billable hour.

Follow these in order. Each one builds on the last, and by the end you'll have a real customer, a real project, and real hours flowing into reporting — not sample data you'll have to delete later.

1

Create your workspace

2 min

Sign up at work.viviscape.io/register. New accounts land on the free Starter plan — no credit card, nothing to cancel.

  • Use your work email. It becomes your sign-in identity across web, mobile, desktop, and the CLI.
  • Name the Organization as your clients would recognize it — it appears on invoices and client-facing views.
  • Prefer single sign-on? You can sign in with Google or Microsoft instead of a password, and a workspace is created on first sign-in.
2

Secure your account

1 min

Onboarding's second screen — “Let's Keep Your Account Safe” — sets up multi-factor authentication. Do it now rather than later; ViviScape Work holds your client list and billing data.

  • Verify your phone or email so MFA codes can reach you.
  • Sessions expire after 4 hours of inactivity and log you back out — expected behavior, not a bug.
3

Set your activity types

3 min Onboarding → Setup Time Tracking Activities

This is the single most important setup decision in ViviScape Work. Activity types (also called services) are the categories every hour gets tagged with — and they drive utilization, invoicing, and every “where did the time go?” report you'll ever run.

  • Start with 3–6, named the way you'd bill them: Consulting, Development, Support, Onsite, Internal / Non-billable.
  • Keep at least one non-billable type. Without it, admin time gets logged against client work and margins look better than they are.
  • Resist a long list. Ten-plus types means inconsistent tagging across the team and reports nobody trusts.
Why it matters: activity types are attached to time entries, not to projects. Renaming one later is fine; deleting one after months of logged time leaves history you can't reclassify in bulk.
4

Add your first customer

2 min Customers → Customer List

A customer is the company record everything else hangs off: projects, tasks, hours, invoices, notes, and tickets all roll up to it.

  • Add the company first, then its contacts. Contacts are the people you'll email invoices to and optionally invite as client collaborators.
  • Use the legal entity name if you'll be invoicing from ViviScape Work or syncing to QuickBooks — matching names keeps the sync clean.
  • On Starter you get one customer. Pro and above are unlimited.
5

Create a project

2 min Work → Projects

Projects are the container for tasks and the unit most reporting groups by. Create one for the engagement you're actually working on this week.

  • Project Name and Customer are the two that matter. Everything else can be filled in later.
  • Set Billable correctly up front — it's what separates revenue work from overhead in Insights.
  • Approved Budget ($) and Approved Time (hrs) give you burn-down against a ceiling. Leave them blank for T&M work.
  • Start Date and End Date drive the timeline view; Status keeps finished work out of active lists.
6

Create and assign a task

2 min Work → Tasks

Tasks are where the day actually happens. A task needs a name, a project, and an activity type — the rest is optional detail you can add as the work firms up.

  • Required to create: Task (the name), Project, and Activity Type.
  • Worth setting now: Status, Priority, Target Date, Estimated Time, and Collaborators (the assignees).
  • Add Tags if you'll want to slice work by theme later — they're free-form and searchable.
  • Unassigned or unscheduled work sits in Backlog until you move it into a project column.
7

Track your first hour

1 min Task → timer, or Add Entry

Two ways to capture time, and both land in the same place:

  • Start the timer on the task you're working, then stop it when you switch. ViviScape Work writes the entry for you.
  • Log it manually — pick the Activity Type, enter time as hh:mm, write a short note, then Add Entry. The note is what shows up on the invoice line, so write it for the client, not for yourself.
  • On the road? The iOS and Android apps clock in and out against the same tasks and sync immediately.
8

Check Insights and invite your team

2 min Collaboration → Insights · Administration → Invite User

Open Insights and set the date range to today. That hour you just logged now appears under Hours by Project, Hours by Activity, and Hours by Team Member. That loop — log once, report everywhere — is the whole point of the system.

  • Invite teammates from Administration → Invite User. They get an email and land in the same workspace.
  • Starter includes two users; Pro and above are unlimited.
  • Insights and activity logs unlock on Pro — on Starter, use Logs for the raw entry list.

You should now have

  • A secured workspace with your organization name on it
  • Activity types that match how you bill
  • One customer, one project, one assigned task
  • At least one time entry tagged to all three
  • A report that can already answer “what did we work on?”

First-week mistakes to skip

  • Importing everything on day one. Run one live project through the full loop first — customer to invoice — then bulk-load history.
  • Twenty activity types. The team will tag inconsistently and your utilization numbers become noise.
  • No non-billable type. Internal time gets misfiled onto clients and margins lie to you.
  • Time entry notes written for yourself. They become invoice lines. Write them for the person paying.
  • Inviting the whole company before the shape is set. Get projects and activity types right with two or three people first.
Fundamentals · 01

How ViviScape Work is organized.

Everything in the platform is a link in one chain. Learn the chain and the rest of the app explains itself.

Workspaceyour account
Customerswho you serve
Projectswhat you owe them
Tasksthe work itself
Time entrieswhat it cost
Invoiceswhat you're paid

Two things cut across the whole chain

Activity types tag every time entry, regardless of which project it belongs to. They're how you answer “how much support work did we do this quarter?” across all clients at once.

People and roles decide what each teammate sees. Admins see the whole workspace; project managers see the projects they run; members see their own work. Client collaborators can be added to a project to see just that engagement.

Everything else attaches

Notes, spaces, tickets, media, and AI conversations all attach to records in that chain rather than living in their own silo. A note on a customer travels with the customer; a ticket resolves into tasks; an AI answer is grounded in the workspace's own data.

Rule of thumb: when you're not sure where something belongs, attach it as far down the chain as it makes sense. A note on the task beats a note on the project; a note on the project beats a note nobody can find. Reports roll upward on their own.

The sidebar, decoded

Five groups, in the order a working day usually moves:

Home

Your dashboard — what's assigned, what's due, what you logged.

Work

Tasks, Projects, Notes, Tickets — and Azure DevOps on Enterprise.

Collaboration

Spaces, AI Studio, Insights, Logs, Team Metrics.

Customers

The customer list and every contact attached to it.

Billing

Invoices built from tracked time. Your own plan lives in the account menu.

Your avatar in the top corner holds Profile, Team, Administration, Switch Account, and Upgrade. Items you don't see are usually gated by plan or role — see what unlocks where.

Fundamentals

Every core module, one tutorial at a time.

Short, practical, and in the order most teams adopt them. Each card tells you where the feature lives, what to do, and the one thing people wish they'd known first.

Set up the foundation Run the work Customers & revenue Knowledge & collaboration Visibility & AI Everywhere else

Set up the foundation

Workspace & profile

Avatar → Profile · Administration

Your profile is your identity across web, mobile, desktop, and CLI. Administration is where workspace-wide settings live.

  1. Set your display name, photo, and time zone — time zone decides which day an entry lands on.
  2. Confirm the organization name and details under Administration; they appear on client-facing documents.
  3. Add MFA and review sign-in methods (password, Google, Microsoft).
  4. If you belong to more than one workspace, use Switch Account rather than signing out.

Tip: a wrong time zone is the most common cause of “my hours are on the wrong day.” Fix it before the team starts logging.

Activity types

Administration → time tracking activities

The vocabulary every hour is tagged with. They power utilization, invoice lines, and cross-client reporting.

  1. Name them the way you bill: Consulting, Development, Support, Onsite.
  2. Keep one clearly non-billable type for admin, sales, and internal work.
  3. Review after a month — merge the ones nobody uses and rename anything ambiguous.
  4. Every task carries an activity type, so new tasks inherit the vocabulary automatically.

Tip: three to six types is the sweet spot. Precision you can't enforce consistently is worse than a coarse category everyone applies the same way.

Team, roles & invites

Administration → Invite User

Who's in the workspace and what they can reach. Roles are the main lever; the plan sets the ceiling.

  1. Invite by email from Administration — the invitee sets their own password or signs in with SSO.
  2. Give admin to whoever owns billing and settings; keep the count small.
  3. Use project manager for leads who need to create projects and see team output.
  4. Everyone else is a member: they see and log their own work.
  5. Add client contacts as client collaborators on a specific project to give visibility without workspace access.

Tip: if a teammate says a menu item is missing, check their role before you check the plan — most “missing features” are role-scoped.

Run the work

Projects & sprints

Work → Projects

The container for tasks, the anchor for budgets, and the grouping most reports use.

  1. Create with Project Name + Customer; set Billable honestly.
  2. Add Approved Budget ($) and Approved Time (hrs) for fixed-scope work to get burn-down.
  3. Set Start / End Date to drive the timeline, and Status to keep the active list honest.
  4. Assign Collaborators, and Client Collaborators when the client should see progress.
  5. Group work into Sprints (e.g. Phase 1) when a project runs long enough to need phases.

Tip: one project per billing arrangement, not per department. If it gets its own invoice, it gets its own project.

Tasks

Work → Tasks

The atomic unit of delivery. Everything else — time, comments, review, invoicing — hangs off a task.

  1. Minimum to create: Task, Project, Activity Type.
  2. Plan it with Status, Priority, Start / Target Date, and Estimated Time.
  3. Assign Collaborators; track progress with Completion %.
  4. Turn on Review Required and name a Reviewer when work shouldn't close unchecked.
  5. Park unscheduled work in Backlog; pull it into a project column when it's real.
  6. Field work? Tasks carry a full address and coordinates for dispatch.

Tip: estimate in the same units you bill. Estimated vs. actual on every task is what makes the next proposal accurate.

Time tracking

Task timer · Add Entry · mobile clock-in

Three capture methods, one destination. Time is what turns activity into an invoice and a utilization number.

  1. Timer: start it on the task you're working, stop it when you switch.
  2. Manual: pick the activity type, enter hh:mm, write a client-readable note, hit Add Entry.
  3. Clock in / out: from the mobile app or the time clock for shift-style work.
  4. Fix mistakes by editing the entry — change duration, note, or date, then Update Entry.
  5. Log against the right day using Log Date when you're catching up on yesterday.

Tip: the entry note becomes the invoice line. “Fixed the thing” costs you a payment cycle; “Diagnosed and patched failing nightly backup job” doesn't.

Logs & the time clock

Collaboration → Logs

The raw ledger of every work entry in the workspace — the place to audit and correct before you invoice.

  1. Filter by Start / End Date, Customer, and Staff to isolate a period.
  2. Scan for untagged, zero-length, or misfiled entries and correct them in place.
  3. Use the Time Clock view for clock-in/clock-out records.
  4. Run this pass before every invoice run — it's a five-minute habit that prevents credit notes.

Tip: Logs is the source of truth; Insights is the summary of it. When a number looks wrong in Insights, come here to find out why. Available on Pro and above.

Customers & revenue

Customers & contacts

Customers → Customer List

One record per company, with the people, projects, hours, notes, and invoices attached to it.

  1. Create the company, then add contacts with real email addresses.
  2. Use the legal entity name if invoices or a QuickBooks sync are in play.
  3. Attach notes as the relationship develops — they stay with the customer, not in someone's inbox.
  4. Open a customer to see everything you've ever done for them in one view.

Tip: avoid duplicates like “Acme” and “Acme Inc.” — split history is the hardest thing to un-split later.

Invoices & billing

Billing → Invoices

Turn tracked time into a document a client can pay, without re-keying anything.

  1. First visit shows Invoicing Setup Required — add your billing details, rates, and defaults once.
  2. Create Invoice, pick the customer and period, and pull in billable time.
  3. Review the lines — they're your entry notes — then set Terms and an optional Memo.
  4. Send it, then track status from the invoice list.
  5. Sync to QuickBooks Online to keep accounting in one ledger.

Tip: clean the Logs pass first. Invoicing is where sloppy time entry becomes a client conversation. Invoices are on Pro and above.

Knowledge & collaboration

Notes

Work → Notes

Keep context in rich text, organize it in notebooks and choose which suggestions become personal to-dos.

  1. Write with autosave and focus mode.
  2. Use one notebook per note, tags and keyword search.
  3. Share a note or notebook with edit access.
  4. Explicitly accept a Todo suggestion to create a personal dashboard to-do.
  5. On Premium or Enterprise, use selected notes in AI Studio through Include Notes.

Access: Notes is included on Pro and higher, subject to module access. AI Suggestions and Magic Wand are included. Existing plan AI-credit allowances are unchanged. AI Studio requires Premium or Enterprise; integrations have separate access requirements. Last 10 title/text versions are retained. Public notes and personal attachment knowledge in AI chat are not available.

Spaces

Collaboration → Spaces

Conversation that stays next to the work instead of scattering across email and chat apps.

  1. Create a space with a clear Space Name — per client or per project beats per topic.
  2. Add the people who need it; keep membership tight enough that the space stays readable.
  3. Post updates, decisions, and questions where they'll be found again.
  4. Use comments on individual tasks for task-specific back-and-forth.

Tip: if a decision happens in a space, write the outcome into a note or task. Chat is where things are decided; records are where they're remembered. Spaces are on Pro and above.

Tickets

Work → Tickets

Inbound support requests with their own queue and lifecycle, feeding the same time and billing pipeline.

  1. Triage incoming tickets and attach each to the right customer.
  2. Convert real work into tasks so it lands on a project and gets tracked.
  3. Log time against that work exactly as you would for project work.
  4. Close the loop with the requester, then review volume by customer in Insights.

Tip: tickets require Enterprise or the Help Desk add-on. Talk to us if you're running a helpdesk on ViviScape Work.

Visibility & AI

Insights

Collaboration → Insights

Where logged time becomes management information — four rollups over any date range you choose.

  1. Set the From / To range — last week, last month, a project's lifetime.
  2. Hours by Project — is the budget holding?
  3. Hours by Team Member — who's over capacity, who's under?
  4. Hours by Activity — how much of the month was billable?
  5. Hours by Account — which clients actually pay for your time?
  6. Open Breakdown to drill from a number into the entries behind it.

Tip: make Hours by Activity a weekly ritual. A billable ratio drifting down three weeks running is the earliest warning a services business gets. Pro and above.

AI Studio

Collaboration → AI Studio

Work through a question with available context in a saved conversation.

  1. Bring automatic or selected notes, tasks, time and commits into context.
  2. Ask a focused question and refine it in the saved thread.
  3. Inspect source material and review the answer.
  4. Save useful output to Notes or an SOP draft.

Access: Premium & Enterprise; account AI allowance applies. Second Brain adds relevant indexed knowledge on Enterprise.

Everywhere else

Mobile & desktop

iOS · Android · Windows desktop

The same workspace, wherever the work happens. Field techs clock in on a phone; the office runs the desktop app.

  1. Install from the App Store or Google Play and sign in with the same account.
  2. Clock in and out, log time, and check assigned tasks from the field.
  3. Install the Windows desktop app for a persistent timer outside the browser.
  4. Everything syncs to one record — no reconciling later.

Tip: for field teams, mobile clock-in is the single highest-return rollout step. Time captured on site is time you don't reconstruct on Friday.

Integrations

/integrations

Connect the tools already in the workflow so ViviScape Work stays the record of what happened.

  1. QuickBooks Online — push invoices and customers into your ledger.
  2. Fireflies.ai — meeting transcripts land as notes on the right customer.
  3. Slack — ask /work for your queue, start timers, and log time from chat.
  4. Google and Microsoft SSO for sign-in; Microsoft Teams and Discord for chat notifications.
  5. SMS notifications via Twilio, and email/push for assignments and mentions.

Tip: connect accounting first. It's the integration that removes the most duplicate entry per hour of setup.

API, CLI & MCP

/developers

Three programmatic paths into the same workspace, with the same identity and audit trail as the web app.

  1. REST API at api.viviscape.io — authenticate, then call any endpoint with a bearer token.
  2. CLI: dotnet tool install -g ViviScape.CLI, then vs auth login for a browser sign-in.
  3. MCP: point Claude or any MCP client at viviscape-mcp and your agent gets typed tools for the workspace.
  4. Start read-only (vs projects ls, vs tasks ls) before writing data.

Full developer docs

Plans

What unlocks where.

Every tutorial above works on some plan; a few modules need Pro or Premium. If a sidebar item isn't there, this table is usually why.

CapabilityStarterProPremium
Tasks, projects & time tracking
Activity types
Users / projects / customers2 users · 1 eachUnlimitedUnlimited
Team & spaces
Insights & activity logs
Notes
Invoices & billing
AI credit allowance25 / mo225 / mo1,500 / mo
QuickBooks & Fireflies
REST APIRead-onlyRead + writeRead + write
CLI (vs)
MCP server for AI agents

Tickets requires Enterprise or the Help Desk add-on. Sales Front and Azure DevOps are Enterprise capabilities — talk to us. Full breakdown on the pricing page.

Common questions

The things new teams ask in week one.

How long does it really take to roll ViviScape Work out to a team?

An hour for one person to complete the Quick Start and shape the workspace, then about a week of the team logging time before the reports mean anything. Run one live project end to end — customer, project, tasks, time, invoice — before you migrate history.

Do I have to use projects, or can I just track time?

You can log time against an activity type alone, but nearly every useful report groups by project and customer. Creating a project takes fifteen seconds and makes hours reportable, billable, and attributable. Do it.

A menu item my colleague has is missing for me. Why?

Two reasons, in order of likelihood: your role (admins and project managers see more than members), or your plan — see what unlocks where. Admins can change roles under Administration.

Can clients see anything inside our workspace?

Only what you deliberately share. Adding a contact as a client collaborator on a project gives them visibility into that project alone — not your other customers, rates, or internal notes.

What if we already track time somewhere else?

Run both for one billing cycle. Log new work in ViviScape Work from day one and let the old system finish out the period. Historical hours can be brought in later through the API or CLI once your projects and activity types are settled.

Does AI Studio see all of our data?

AI Studio on Premium and Enterprise uses available automatic or selected notes, tasks, time and commits as context. It does not include every account record, and source titles are not verified per-claim citations.

What happens to my data if we outgrow the free plan?

Nothing moves or disappears. Upgrading from inside the platform unlocks the gated modules on the same workspace, with all your existing customers, projects, and hours intact.

Start now

Fifteen minutes to your first tracked hour.

Create a free workspace, follow the Quick Start, and have one real project running before lunch.

Create a free workspace Back to Quick Start