Features — InControl

01 — Backward planning

The date is the input, not the guess at the end

You tell InControl the day the thing has to be true — the wedding, the closing, the move-in — and the engine schedules the work backward from it. Every task lands where it has to land for the date at the end to hold, and every task knows how much room it has left. That room is slack, and InControl shows it to you in days rather than making you infer it from bar widths.

When slack runs thin, the task is flagged at risk. When a task is past its date and still open, it is flagged behind. Both of those show up on the timeline and in your morning email, on the day it happens, not the week before the deadline.

Here is the part we care most about: InControl never silently moves your dates. If a change would push something downstream, it warns you and shows you what would move. Then you decide. A planner that quietly rewrites the plan is a planner you stop believing, so ours doesn't.

A wedding timeline in InControl: the Venue & Date and Guests & Invitations epics as lanes of task bars from July to December, a blue TODAY line, a DEC 29 goal marker, dependency arrows, and a cash-flow strip along the bottom. — July through December against a Dec 29 goal. Two epic lanes — Venue & Date due Dec 1, Guests & Invitations due Dec 9 — with completed tasks ticked, black diamonds for milestones, dashed lines for dependencies, and the blue TODAY line cutting through all of it.

02 — Honest cash flow

Estimates are visible everywhere and counted nowhere

Money lives on the tasks. Each task carries entries — real amounts, in or out — and estimates, which are a different kind of thing and are treated as one. An estimate stays on screen the whole time, drawn dashed and labelled "est", so you never lose sight of what a project is likely to cost. It is never added into NET. NET is money that moved.

Set a budget for the project and Remaining updates as you go. Add recurring costs by the month or the year — storage, insurance, a rental — and they carry forward on their own. Payments that are due get a schedule, so a balance owed in November is visible in August.

All of it lives in the sticky strip under the timeline, on the same time axis as the work, so a heavy month of spending lines up with the tasks that caused it. Collapse the strip when you want the schedule to yourself.

The cash-flow strip: NET, monthly delta, budget and remaining shown as chips, with solid bars for real entries and dashed bars for estimates plotted along the same time axis. — NET −$27,412.55, monthly Δ −$403.50/mo, budget $38,000, remaining $10,587.45 — and estimates totalled off to the side, ~+$196,410 and ~−$699/mo, deliberately outside the NET figure. Solid bars are real entries, dashed bars are estimates, dotted markers are recurring costs, and "DUE" labels are scheduled payments.

03 — Documents

The work sits on the task it belongs to

Open a task and everything about it is in one drawer: its dates and slack, its money, what it blocks and what blocks it, a checklist, the vendors involved, and its documents. No hunting through a folder tree to find the quote that goes with the quote request.

Documents are real markdown documents — headings, tables, links, lists — written in the app and autosaved as you type. Spreadsheets are there too, with money columns that total, for the side maths that shouldn't touch the plan's cash flow; those totals are kept out of cash flow and labelled as such, so nothing is counted twice. Uploads and plain links attach the same way.

Anything attached to one task can be moved to another. Plans change shape; the paperwork should be able to follow.

The task drawer for “Sign venue contract and pay holding deposit”, showing cash flow, dependencies, a checklist, vendors, documents, milestone toggles and an AI research log. — One task, everything on it: done Jul 31 → Aug 5 with 115 days of slack, a −$4,200 holding deposit, what it blocks, a 2-of-4 checklist, the venue's email and phone number, the signed agreement, milestone toggles, and the research log at the bottom.

And a sheet when a sheet is what you want

Not every number belongs in the plan's cash flow. A sheet lives on the task it belongs to, totals its own money columns, and says plainly at the bottom that its figures are document figures and are not counted in cash flow — so the budget you reconcile against never double-counts itself.

A sheet titled Budget tracker on a task, with eleven category rows and columns for Budgeted, Committed, Paid to date and Status, a totals row, and a line reading “Document figures — not counted in cash flow”. — Eleven wedding categories totalling $57,300 budgeted, $56,905 committed and $12,455 paid so far. The totals row is the sheet's own arithmetic; the line underneath is the app keeping it out of the project's cash flow.

04 — The assistant

An AI that does the work, and shows what it did

Every project has its own assistant, and it produces output you can use rather than a chat transcript. Ask it about a task and it researches on the live web, then writes what it found into a document attached to that task — a comparison table, a summary, the numbers it turned up — with the sources listed. Those sources are labelled honestly: a page it actually fetched and read is marked differently from a search-result snippet it only glimpsed. The difference matters, so we show it.

It drafts the first version of your plan in the setup wizard — epics, tasks and cost estimates, with the estimates entered as estimates. It watches the schedule for risk and proposes fixes rather than applying them.

Every move it makes is logged, and anything it changed can be undone. You can always see what it did and put it back.

A document titled Tulum venue comparison attached to the task Site-visit trip, with headings, prose, and a six-column table comparing five venues on capacity, site fee, catering, in-house kitchen and rain plan. — Research written straight into a document on the site-visit task: what was being solved for, five venues priced across capacity, site fee, catering, kitchen and rain plan, the reasoning for the pick, and an open list of what still needs deciding.

05 — The morning digest

One email, first thing, and then you can stop thinking about it

A plan you have to remember to open is a plan you will stop opening. So InControl sends one email a day with what has fallen behind and the next payment leaving your account. Nothing else, and nothing at any other hour — it goes out once daily at 13:00 UTC, which is early morning in the Americas and evening in Asia.

The same summary is the first thing on your dashboard, across every project you have running: today's tasks with the project they belong to, how many things are behind, the portfolio-wide net, and each project's goal date, days remaining and progress. If the day is clear, it says so plainly instead of finding something to worry you with.

One switch turns the email on and off. The digest is composed by the app from your own rows rather than written by a model, so it is arithmetic, not a paraphrase of arithmetic.

The InControl dashboard: a Today panel listing three tasks with their projects, a zero-behind chip, next payment and portfolio net, and a project sidebar with two projects showing goal dates and progress bars. — Today · Mon Aug 31: 0 behind, next payment Sep 16, portfolio net −$67,661.55, and the three tasks starting today tagged with their projects. The Daily email toggle is up in the header; the sidebar tracks both projects against a Dec 29 goal.

And the rest

The smaller pieces that keep a plan usable

Vendors

Attach a vendor to a task with their email, phone number and a link out to them — the caterer on the catering task, the movers on the move. No separate address book to keep in sync.

Checklists

Some tasks are one thing; some are four small things you keep forgetting one of. Add checklist items and the task carries its own count.

Dependencies across epics

Say that the deposit blocks the date lock, even when the two live in different epics. The timeline draws the link, and the schedule respects it.

Milestones and reordering

Flag a task as a milestone and it is marked as one on the timeline and on its epic. Move epics and tasks up and down as the shape of the plan changes.

Epics group the work and carry their own numbers

An epic is a phase — venue, guests, vendors — with a due date, a completion count, and its own real spend kept separate from its own estimates, so you can see which phase is actually carrying the budget.

An epic card titled Vendors & Production, due Dec 28, 1 of 11 done, minus $9,900 with estimates of about minus $9,200, reorder arrows and an Open epic link.

Zoom from the whole project down to single days

The wide view answers "are we going to make it". Zoomed in to day columns, it answers "what am I doing this week, and what is waiting on it".

The timeline zoomed to individual day columns through July and August, with task bars, checkmarks on completed tasks and dependency lines between them. — Day-by-day through July and August: each bar's exact span, ticks on what is done, and the cash-flow strip still tracking the same dates underneath.

Every part of it, and what it actually does.