Family Projects: one place for the plan, the papers and the conversation

A family plan usually ends up scattered: the dates in one chat, the booking confirmations in an inbox, the costs in someone's head, and the list of who is doing what nowhere at all. A Family Project is Grace's answer to that. It keeps the plan, its knowledge, its schedule, its tasks, its budget and its ongoing conversation in one place, so anyone taking part can see the same picture.

Start private, share when you are ready

In Workspace, choose Family Projects, then New Family Project. The setup guide asks what the project is, who should take part, and which additional knowledge bases it should use.

While you are filling it in, the project is saved as a private draft. Only you can see an unfinished draft, even if another family member is a parent, and the choices you make in the draft are not an invitation to anyone else until you finish setup. That means you can think a trip, a party or a school project through properly before anyone else sees it, and come back to it later from the project list if you need to stop halfway.

What lives in a project

Every project has its own knowledge base from the start, even before it has any documents in it. Upload files such as booking confirmations under Project documents, and wait for indexing to finish before asking about their contents.

You can also bring material in from elsewhere in Grace:

• On a chat response, choose Add to knowledge base and select the project.
• From a note, choose Add to knowledge base, or copy a whole notes section the same way.

Copies from notes are snapshots: later edits to the original note do not update the copy, so save a fresh copy and remove outdated material when something changes. You can also attach additional family knowledge bases to the project's chat, and save chats and responses to the project itself.

Alongside the knowledge, the project holds its schedule and its tasks, and adults who can edit the project can attach costs. Saving a cost also adds it to the project's budget, so the plan and the money stay in step instead of living in two places.

The Planner runs the project's chat

The Planner is the project's assistant. Open the project's chat and it works with the current schedule, tasks, permitted budget and costs, saved chats and responses, and the project's knowledge. Current project records take priority over older saved answers, so the chat answers from where the plan is now, not where it was last month.

Ask it to do the joining-up work, for example: build a day-by-day itinerary around the saved events, compare ticket options against the remaining budget, and look up current opening hours. It flags gaps and assumptions and compares alternatives, and when web search is available to your family it cites the online research it used. Check prices and availability before booking, as you would with any plan.

One thing to know: a chat reply on its own does not change the project. Its suggestions become saved events, tasks or budget changes only when you use the relevant controls. That is deliberate. The conversation can propose, but you decide what actually goes into the plan.

Who sees what

When the project is ready, choose its members or access groups and whether each gets read-only or edit access. Children can take part in projects shared with them, within their account permissions.

Money has its own boundary. Adult budget and cost controls remain unavailable to children, and if children can read a project's chat, adult budget information is omitted from that chat for the whole audience, including answers to parents. Personal calendar connections and private adult budgets are not automatically part of a project chat either. A project is shared, but it does not quietly share everything.

Before you delete one

Deleting a project also deletes its chat and its own knowledge-base documents, so review what you want to keep first. Additional family knowledge bases attached to the project are separate from its own store and are not deleted with it. Parents manage completed family projects, and another person's private draft stays private to them.

Getting started

Open Workspace, choose Family Projects, and start a project as a private draft. Our tutorial, Start a Family Project, walks through each screen, including the calendar and budget walkthrough it links to.