Documentation

Kairo is a workspace for tracking time, organizing tasks, and keeping your team aligned — with the billing, reporting, and AI tools to actually understand where your time goes.

It combines a flexible project manager (tasks, Kanban, calendar, Gantt, and more views), a one-click time tracker with billing rates and profitability reports, role-based collaboration for teams and clients, and Max, an AI assistant that can act on your project for you.

This guide covers every feature, from creating your first project to advanced reporting.

Everything in Kairo fits into a small set of building blocks:

Workspace

The top-level container for your team. Holds projects, members, teams, and all data. You can belong to several.

Project

A group of related work inside a workspace, with its own tasks, board, calendar, tags, and optional billing.

Task

A unit of work with a status, priority, assignee, due date, subtasks, checklists, comments, and time entries.

Time entry

A tracked block of time logged against a task — created live with the timer or added manually.

Tag

A colored label to categorize and filter tasks within a project.

Team

A named group of workspace members (with a color) for organizing larger workspaces.

Role

Determines what a person can see and do — set per workspace and per project.

You can be up and running in a couple of minutes.

1. 1Create your account. Sign up with your email and confirm it with the verification code we send. A workspace is created for you automatically.
2. 2Create a project. From Projects, add one with a name and color — or start from a template to get tasks and columns pre-filled.
3. 3Add tasks. Give each a status, priority, assignee, and due date. Break big ones into subtasks.
4. 4Track time. Hit the timer on a task to start tracking, or log time manually later from the timesheet.
5. 5Invite your team. Add teammates by email or share a join link, and assign each the right role.

The left sidebar is your home base. The main areas are:

• Dashboard — an overview of activity, tracked time, deadlines, and productivity.
• Projects — your project list; open one for its tasks, board, calendar, and more.
• Timesheet — every time entry in one place, with filters and stats.
• Messages — your notifications and updates.
• Global Kanban — tasks from every project on a single board.
• Templates — start new projects from a ready-made structure.

The top header keeps your active timer and notificationsvisible everywhere. At the bottom of the sidebar you'll find the workspace switcher, your profile, and controls for language and light/dark theme.

Create an account with your email and a password. We send a verification code to confirm your address before you start. Once verified, you sign in from the login screen and land on your dashboard.

Your Profile screen is where you manage your identity (display name and photo), preferences, billing rates, and security.

Personalize how dates, times, and money appear across the app from your profile:

• Timezone — so timestamps and the timer match your local time.
• Currency — used for billing rates and money in reports.
• Locale — number and date formatting; the app interface is available in English and Spanish.
• Time format — 12-hour or 24-hour.
• Week starts on — Monday or Sunday, affecting the calendar and weekly charts.

Each person can set two hourly figures on their profile, which power Kairo's money reports:

• Hourly rate (billed) — what you charge clients per hour of work.
• Internal cost (per hour) — your real cost to the company (salary + overhead).

Combined with tracked time, these drive the profitability figures on the dashboard and in project reports — comparing billable value against internal cost.

Enable two-factor authentication (2FA) from your profile for extra security. When turned on, signing in requires a one-time verification code sent to your email in addition to your password. You can toggle it on or off at any time after confirming a code.

A workspace is the container for everything your team does in Kairo.

Projects, tasks, time entries, teams, and members all belong to a workspace. You can be part of more than one and switch between them from the sidebar. Data never crosses between workspaces, so a client workspace and your internal one stay completely separate.

There are two ways to bring people into a workspace or project:

• By email — send a direct invitation. They receive an email and join when they accept.
• By join link — share a link so people can request to join; an admin approves the request.

When inviting, you pick the person's role. You can change a member's role or remove them later — within the limits of your own role (see Roles & permissions). Pending invitations and join requests are listed so you can track and approve them.

Kairo uses role-based access at both the workspace and project level. The six roles are:

Who can do what

In larger workspaces you can organize people into teams — each with a name, color, optional description, and its own list of members. Owners and admins create and manage teams from Workspace → Teams, making it easier to reason about who works on what.

Every meaningful action — creating a project, completing a task, logging time, changing a role — is recorded. Recent activity surfaces on the dashboard and project pages, and owners/admins can review the full history from Workspace → Audit to see who changed what and when.

Projects group related work so your tasks, board, time, and reports stay organized.

Creating a project

From Projects, create one with a name, color, and optional description. It immediately gets its own task list, Kanban board, calendar, tags, and members.

Visibility

• Private — only people explicitly added can access it (plus workspace admins/owners for oversight).
• Public — any workspace member can view it as a guest.

You can edit a project's details, manage its members and their roles, and review pending invites or join requests from the project's settings.

Projects can enable billing & budgetwith an hourly rate and estimated hours. Together with tracked time and each member's billing rates, this lets Kairo show how a project is tracking against its budget and whether it's profitable.

Create tags per project to categorize tasks — for example bug, design, or urgent. Each tag has a color from a built-in palette, and you can filter any board or view by tag to focus on a slice of the work.

Templates let you spin up a project with its tasks, columns, and tags already in place.

• Built-in templates — a library organized by category, each with a preview of included tasks and tags.
• Custom templates — save any project as a reusable template (look for "Save as template"), then find it under "My Templates".
• Generate with AI — describe what you need and let Max build a tailored template for you.

When you use a template you can rename the project and, if the template supports it, turn on billing with an hourly rate and estimated hours before creating it.

From a project's Kanban view you can generate a public share link. Anyone with the link sees a clean, read-only board with your columns, tasks, descriptions, subtasks, and attachments — no account required, and no changes allowed. It's ideal for sharing progress with clients or stakeholders.

Tasks are the core unit of work. Each one can carry:

Status

To Do, In Progress, In Review, or Completed — moves through your workflow.

Priority

Low, Medium, High, or Urgent, each color-coded.

Assignee

The person responsible for the task.

Due date

Powers the calendar, timeline, and overdue views.

Tags

Categorize and filter the task.

Time entries

Time tracked against the task, live or manual.

Open a task to see its full detail view, where you can edit everything and read its comment thread.

Split a large task into subtasks to track its parts independently, and add checklists to tick off the steps within a task. Both give you a clear sense of progress without creating clutter on your board.

Every task has a rich-text comment thread. Type @ to mention a project member — an autocomplete suggests people, and the person you mention gets an in-app notification and an email.

• You can only mention people who are members of the project.
• You can't mention yourself — self-notifications are filtered out.
• Comments are limited to 5,000 characters.
• Mentions in posted comments are kept intact to preserve the thread's integrity.

Tasks can hold attachments, so the files and references a task needs live right next to the work. Attachments also appear on publicly shared boards.

Switch how you see a project's tasks without changing the data — pick the view that fits the moment.

• List — a straightforward, sortable list of tasks.
• Kanban — drag tasks across status columns.
• Calendar — tasks laid out by due date.
• Timeline & Gantt — see tasks across time and their schedule.
• By assignee & By priority — group tasks to spot focus and balance.
• Overdue & Workload — analyze what's late and how work is distributed across the team.

The Kanban board organizes tasks into columns — by default To Do, In Progress, In Review, and Completed. Drag a task between columns to change its status instantly, and filter by tag, assignee, or priority to focus.

The Global Kanban brings tasks from every project in the workspace onto one board, so you can plan your day across everything at once.

The Calendar lays tasks out by due date so you can spot busy days. The Timeline and Gantt views show how tasks are scheduled over time — useful for planning sequences of work and seeing the shape of a project at a glance.

• By assignee — group tasks per person to see who owns what.
• By priority — group by urgency to triage.
• Overdue — surface everything past its due date.
• Workload — visualize how tasks are distributed so no one is overloaded.

Start tracking in a single click — no setup required.

Hit the timer on any task and Kairo records time against it. The active timer stays visible in the header as you move around the app, so you always know what you're tracking. Stop it when you're done and the entry is saved automatically.

The Timesheet brings all your time entries together. Filter by project or date, review summary stats, edit existing entries, and add entries manually for time you tracked offline. With billing rates set, your tracked time also rolls up into the money figures in reports.

When a task with estimated hours set has more time logged than estimated, Kairo sends an overtime alert— both an in-app notification and an email — telling you by how much it went over. The alert is sent once per task so you're informed without being spammed.

The dashboard summarizes your work and your team's, filterable by date range.

It brings together:

• Summary & task overview cards — totals for tasks and tracked time.
• Tasks by status and completed-per-week charts.
• Priority breakdown — how your tasks split across priorities.
• Project status & profitability — health and money per project.
• Team productivity and upcoming deadlines.
• Recent activity — the latest changes across the workspace.

Using each member's billed rate and internal cost alongside tracked time, Kairo calculates how much value a project generates versus what it costs to deliver. The profitability card on the dashboard turns your time data into a clear money picture per project.

Generate a PDF report for a project that pulls together its tasks, due dates, and key details into a clean document you can share or archive. You can also export your time data for use in other tools.

Max is Kairo's built-in AI assistant — a teammate that knows your project inside out.

Open Max from within a project and it has full context on the project's tasks, time entries, assignments, and recent activity. From the global view it has an overview of all your projects — open a specific one for detailed, task-level help. Just ask in plain language.

Beyond answering questions, Max can act directly on your workspace:

• Create projects, tasks, and tags
• Update, complete, or delete tasks, and toggle subtasks
• Assign tasks and move them between Kanban columns
• Add comments on your behalf
• Log time against a task
• Look up project data and search the web for information
• Navigate you to the right screen

For longer pieces — a plan, a spec, a summary — Max can write to the canvas, a side panel where the document lives. Keep chatting to refine it and Max edits the canvas in place, instead of flooding the conversation with long text.

On the Templates screen, choose Generate with AI and describe the kind of project you need. Max produces a tailored template — tasks, columns, and tags — which you can review, tweak, and turn into a real project in seconds.

Kairo notifies you about the things that involve you — @mentions, invitations, and overtime alerts — both in the app and by email. The notifications dropdown shows a badge with your unread count, and clicking a notification takes you straight to the relevant task. Mark items as read individually or all at once.

Kairo offers three plans so you only pay for what you need:

All plans include Kanban boards, time tracking, activity logs, and data export. Upgrade any time from the Pricing screen.