Connected apps

What connects, and the read-only principle#

A firm admin connects other tools from Settings → Connected apps: a grid of apps, click one to connect it. The working principle is read-only: COREboards reads from the connected app to enrich your firm's picture and never changes your data there. (The one exception is Notion's optional to-do checkoff, which you enable explicitly in Notion, below.)

• Harvest: pull time, projects, and people from a separate timekeeping app into your firm-wide picture.
• HubSpot: feed your sales pipeline into the Resource Allocation capacity forecast.
• QuickBooks Online: fill your Benchmark numbers and Scoreboard check-in from your books' P&L.
• Notion: show a project's Notion notes and tasks on its Overview.
• monday.com: turn a work-management board into next week's Game Plan.
• Calendars (Google, Microsoft 365, Apple): personal connections made from the timecard rather than here (below).
• Outlook add-in: an Add to COREboards button on any email that turns it into a BQE CORE to-do, installed once for the whole firm by your Microsoft 365 administrator (below).
• Tiles marked Soon are on the roadmap. If one of them is the app your firm uses, tell us and we'll prioritize it.

Harvest: a second timekeeping app#

Run part of your firm on Harvest: a separate office, or a distinct business like an interiors studio? Connect it and those hours join your firm-wide Staff Utilization, its revenue shows in the Forecast detail, and your own Harvest time appears on your Time Card — where you can log to Harvest without leaving COREboards.

Harvest revenue, and why it sits beside your CORE numbers

Harvest revenue is earned value: billable hours at their bill rate, counted as the work happens. That is deliberate. Most Harvest projects are time-and-materials with no fee recorded, so there is no contract to burn down and no "remaining" to report — the work itself is the revenue.

• The forward figure is a pace, not committed work: what the last three complete months averaged, projected over the next 90 days. It's shown apart from your CORE forecast, which is contract a client has signed for. Adding the two together would give you a headline you couldn't defend in a meeting.
• Harvest projects that do carry a fee are reported separately, with what's left to earn against it — for those, the contract question has an answer.
• Hours marked billable with no bill rate earn nothing, and the panel says how many there are, since that's usually the difference between this number and the one you expected.
• To connect: click the Harvest tile, create a Personal Access Token at id.getharvest.com/developers, paste the token and your Account ID, then Test & Connect. Every Harvest user has that Developers page, but have an administrator create the token: Harvest gives a token exactly the access its owner has, so a Manager's token sees only what they manage and a Member's sees only their own time. COREboards checks and warns you if the token is limited.
• Sync now pulls the latest projects, people, and time entries; the tile shows when it last synced. A sync also happens on its own each day.

Mapping people, the step that makes hours count

Harvest hours reach a person's utilization only once you say who that person is, under Map people to your CORE staff. COREboards suggests a match by email address (or by name when it's unambiguous) and you confirm it. Nothing is matched automatically, because crediting one person's billable hours to another is worse than showing nothing.

• Same person as… — they're a CORE employee too. Their Harvest hours join the utilization they already have.
• Harvest only — they work solely in the other app. They appear as their own row, with capacity taken from their Harvest weekly capacity.
• Ignore — a contractor, a test account, someone who left. Left out entirely.
• Anyone you haven't mapped contributes nothing. The Staff Utilization panel names how many people that is, and how many hours are sitting behind them, so missing time always has a visible cause.
• Credentials are sent once on connect and never shown again. Disconnect removes the connection and every row it synced.

HubSpot: pipeline into capacity#

Connect HubSpot and your deals flow into the Resource Allocation board's Capacity lens as the work you're about to win: the “what if we win” view of whether the firm has room for what's in the pipeline.

• To connect: click the HubSpot tile and you're sent to HubSpot to approve read-only access to your deals, then brought back. COREboards never sees your HubSpot password.
• Sync now refreshes the deal list on demand; syncs also happen on their own.

What it gives you

• Every open deal becomes a pursuit you can toggle into the charts, so you can see the month the plan breaks before you've won the work.
• Each deal is sized from its amount and close date. When you know the shape of the team, refine it by studio and the estimate gives way to your own numbers.
• Save a mix of pursuits as a named scenario and bring the same one to every go/no-go conversation.

Where the pursuits come from, and leaving some out

The What-if panel pools every place a firm keeps not-yet-real work: HubSpot deals, CORE CRM opportunities, Project Launch drafts, and CORE projects sitting on Hold or Draft. The Feeding this list row at the top of the panel names each one, with how many pursuits it contributed and, for HubSpot, when it last synced.

• Switch a feed off by clicking it. That's your own view of the panel and changes nothing for your colleagues.
• Dismiss a single pursuit with the × beside it: a deal you're not really chasing, or a Hold project that's never coming back. Dismissing is firm-wide, and it changes nothing in HubSpot or CORE.
• Dismissed something by mistake? Show dismissed at the bottom of the list brings them back into view, each with a Restore button.

QuickBooks Online: your books, proposing your numbers#

Connect QuickBooks Online and COREboards reads your monthly Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet totals — nothing else. No invoices, no customers, no individual transactions, and nothing is ever written back. (This is a different product from QuickBooks Time, the TSheets timekeeping app, which has its own tile.)

• To connect: click the QuickBooks Online tile and you're sent to Intuit to sign in and approve read-only access to your company, then brought back. COREboards never sees your Intuit password.
• Sync now refreshes the current and prior year on demand; a sync also runs on its own each day.

What it fills in

• Benchmark → Your firm's numbers: a Fill from QuickBooks button proposes net revenue, total expenses, and total labor from your P&L, each with a note naming the lines it used. You review and edit before saving — same contract as uploading a P&L PDF, without the PDF.
• Firm Scoreboard → Monthly check-in: the hand-entered financial rows (operating expenses, payroll, cash in bank, credit-card balances) show a green QuickBooks suggestion. Click it to accept, adjust if your definition differs (say, trimming reimbursables), then save. Suggestions never enter the scoreboard on their own.
• Payroll is read from the payroll accounts on your chart of accounts. If your books keep salaries under unusual account names, check the proposed number against your P&L the first time.
• Disconnect removes the connection, revokes COREboards' access with Intuit, and deletes every synced figure.

Notion notes & tasks on a project#

Once your firm connects Notion, each project's Overview gains a Notion notes & tasks tile. A project editor links one Notion page to the project; that page's checkbox to-dos and readable notes then show on the tile and refresh on their own (when you return to the tab, and about once a minute). You can check a to-do off, or add one, right from the tile, and the Notion page updates to match.

• To link a page: open a project → Overview → the Notion notes & tasks tile → Link a Notion page → search and pick it, or paste the page's Notion link to link it instantly.

Sharing a page with COREboards

COREboards can only read Notion pages you've explicitly shared with it (that's Notion's security model, and it's a good thing: you control exactly what's visible).

• In Notion, open the page → ••• (top-right) → type connections in the “Search actions” box → Add connections → choose COREboards.
• Tip: share a parent page or teamspace once and every page inside it is covered, so new project pages appear automatically.
• A newly shared page can take a moment to appear in the picker's search. Paste its Notion link instead to link it right away.

monday.com: a board becomes next week's plan#

Some teams run their work on a monday.com board and would rather keep doing that. Connect it and the Game Plan's Tasks pane can pull a board straight into the week: Import → pick the board → review → done. Nothing is written back to monday.

• To connect: a firm admin opens Settings → Connected apps → monday.com, and pastes an API token from monday (your avatar → Developers → My Access Tokens). A monday token carries exactly its owner's board access, so use an account the relevant boards are shared with.

Match the columns once, in Settings

monday boards have no fixed shape: one firm's Task column is another's Activity, and a third keeps the work in the item name. So an admin says which column answers which COREboards field, once, under Settings → Connected apps → monday.com → Choose the board and match its columns. After that the Import button is a single click for everyone, with no board to pick and nothing guessed.

• Pick the board, then set each field: Project, Phase, Activity, Task, Hours, Assignee, Memo, Due date, Status. Project and Task are required; anything you leave as Not on this board imports blank.
• The form arrives pre-filled from your column names, so a board built to the CSV template (Project, Phase, Activity, Task, Hours, Assignee, Memo) needs no edits at all. The template doubles as the board layout.
• The item name is offered alongside the real columns, because on plenty of boards the first column IS the project number.
• Haven't set it up? Imports still work: you pick a board each time and the columns are guessed from their names. The review says which it used, so you can see the difference.
• Rename or delete a column in monday and that field quietly becomes blank rather than breaking the import. Re-open the mapping to point it somewhere new.
• Items marked Done, or sitting in a group called Completed, are left behind rather than planned again. The review counts how many.

The review is the same one the CSV import uses

• Project matching is forgiving on purpose. The project number (“19-34”) wins outright, so a row carrying one is matched however the name beside it is spelled. Otherwise the name is matched word by word, ignoring case, punctuation and word order — “Aspen Cultural Center” finds “19-34 - ASPEN CULTURAL CENTER” — and a typo is forgiven when only one project could be meant.
• Phase matching leads with the CORE Phase ID (“26-08 ID-L1 | GBK”). It is unique across the firm, so a column holding it lands the row on the right phase even when the project column says nothing useful — and even when every project has a phase called Concept, SD or CD. Failing that, the phase name is matched exact, then as a starting fragment, then as a fragment anywhere; a column holding the ID and the name together works as well.
• Nothing is ever guessed between two candidates. When a row matches two projects, or none, it is held back with the reason shown and a picker on the row: choose the project and phase yourself and it joins the import (the picker's search box finds a phase by its ID too). A row you leave unpicked creates nothing.
• When a match needed the typo pass, the row says read from “…” so you can disagree with the correction before importing.
• People are matched against your live CORE staff. A full name matches however your firm writes it round (“Steven Burns” finds “Burns, Steven”), accents are ignored, and a board carrying more of someone's name than CORE holds still finds them (“María Fernanda García López” finds “Maria Garcia”). An unmatched or ambiguous name imports as Anyone with the reason shown.
• monday meters its API by query size rather than call count, and smaller plans have a modest budget. If an import says the budget is spent, it names the number of seconds to wait.

Outlook: an email becomes a to-do#

A client emails you about the kitchen cabinets on 25-003. Click Add to COREboards above the message and it becomes a BQE CORE to-do, already on the right project and phase, already assigned to whoever should handle it. It appears in CORE, on your To-Do panel, on the project, and in the assignee's next digest.

Using it

• Open an email you have received and click Add to COREboards in the toolbar above it. On a narrow window it sits under the ⋯ (More actions) menu. A panel opens on the right.
• The first time only, a small window asks you to sign in to COREboards with BQE CORE, the same way you sign in to COREboards itself. If you are already signed in, it closes on its own. You will not be asked again for about two months, and signing in on your computer also covers your phone.
• The panel has already drafted the to-do. The subject line becomes the to-do, tidied up. The notes carry who wrote and what they asked, without the whole thread underneath. The project is picked out from the job number in the subject, then in the body, then from the project's name; the quiet line under the field says what it matched on, so a wrong guess is visible rather than silent. If it cannot tell, it says so and leaves the field for you.
• Change anything: the project and phase from the picker, Assign to anybody on your CORE staff list, the due date, the priority, the wording. Nothing is saved until you click Create to-do.
• After it saves, the panel offers to add another to-do from the same email, which is useful when one message asks for three things. Sign out sits at the bottom of the panel, and it signs you out on every device at once.
• It only ever reads the message you have open. It cannot send, move, file, flag or delete anything in your mailbox, and it never reads any other email. You can only pick projects you already have access to in COREboards.

Setting it up for your firm (administrators)

One person installs it once and everybody gets the button. It is a web page and takes about three minutes: sign in at admin.microsoft.com as a global administrator, go to Settings → Integrated apps → Upload custom apps, choose Office Add-in and Provide link to manifest file, paste https://coreboards.app/outlook/manifest.xml, assign it to the entire organization, accept the permission (read the open message, nothing else), and finish.

• If admin.microsoft.com sends you to GoDaddy or another reseller's page with no Integrated apps section, your Microsoft 365 is resold and that page has been removed. The printable guide below has a one-line install for that case, for Windows and for Mac, written for someone who has never opened PowerShell. It also has a box to paste into ChatGPT or Claude if you would rather be walked through it.
• Microsoft delivers the button to each mailbox on its own schedule: usually within a day, and up to a few days on reseller-hosted email. Quit and reopen Outlook once a day to check; running the install again will not hurry it.
• To remove it later, the same guide has a one-line uninstall. It removes the button from everyone's Outlook and changes nothing in COREboards or CORE.

Printable guide: Add to COREboards (PDF) ↗

Your calendar, feeding your timecard#

Calendar connections are personal, not firm-wide, and live where you use them: the calendar drawer beside your timecard in the Time Card panel. Connect a calendar and the week's events appear next to your hours, each with a suggested project, phase, and activity, ready to become real CORE time entries in a click.

• Google Calendar and Microsoft 365 connect through a small sign-in popup: approve read-only access to your calendar and you're done. Google note: while COREboards is still being verified by Google, its screen warns the app isn't verified and leaves the calendar box unticked — choose Advanced → “Go to COREboards” and be sure to tick “View events on all your calendars” before Continue, or your calendar won't actually connect.
• Apple Calendar (or any other calendar app) connects as a calendar feed: paste a webcal:// or https:// feed link. In Apple Calendar: right-click a calendar → Share Calendar → Public Calendar, then copy the link.
• Add calendar connects more: several accounts and feeds can sit side by side, each with its own show/hide toggle, so a personal calendar can stay out of the way.
• The event-to-project mapping is self-training: confirm where an event belongs once and the next similar event arrives pre-sorted.

The full how-to (calendar events as ghost entries, filters, dismissing an event, logging from the calendar view) lives in the Logging time chapter.