Introducing Keel: the weekly report writes itself

Keel is project management for people who hate managing projects. You drag a timeline, paste the updates you already receive, and Keel drafts the weekly client report, keeps the risk and action register current, and chases the people who owe you something. It is built for consultants, delivery leads and internal project owners who run a handful of client projects at once.

The problem is Friday, not the plan

Most delivery people can hold their plan in their head. What breaks them is the reporting tax. On Friday afternoon the same ritual runs: read five update emails, open a register spreadsheet nobody else has touched since kickoff, rebuild a status deck from last week's, then chase three people on Slack for the answer you needed on Tuesday.

None of that is planning. It is transcription. The information already exists — scattered across a mailbox, a meeting transcript, a couple of chat threads — and the job is to turn it into one honest page a client can read.

Tools built for software teams do not help here. Boards and backlogs assume a permanent team working in sprints. Client delivery is phases, dependencies, milestones and a handful of people who will never log into your project tool. So the plan ends up in a spreadsheet and the report ends up in a document, and neither knows the other exists.

Three mechanics

A timeline you can grab. Keel's canvas is a business-day timeline — weekends never render. Drag a phase to move it, drag its edges to resize it, drag it vertically to run work in parallel. Dependencies are real finish-to-start edges drawn on the canvas, so when you move a phase everything downstream follows. If you have deliberately overlapped two phases, Keel leaves that alone rather than snapping them back into line. Every change is one undo step, and there is no Save button.

Updates in, register out. Paste a meeting transcript, a client email or a few lines of your own notes into the project's Updates tab. Keel reads it and proposes register entries — risks, assumptions, issues, dependencies, changes, actions and decisions — plus any schedule changes it thinks follow. Nothing is applied until you accept it. You can keep a workspace library of the risks and assumptions you see on every engagement and drop them in with one click.

Contributors without logins. Invite someone by email and they get a private link, not an account. They see only the phases you scoped them to, mark their deliverables and actions done, and answer with Done, Still on it, or Blocked plus a note. Every submission goes on the record and feeds the next report. Clients get the same treatment: a Waiting tab shows everything sitting with them, sorted by how late it is, with a drafted nudge you can edit and send.

Then the weekly report. Keel reads what moved since the last one — phase progress, milestones hit or missed, new register items, contributor notes, what is waiting on the client — and writes the draft. You edit it. You send it. That is the whole loop.

What is in the beta today

Everything above is built and working: timelines with dependencies and cascade, four built-in project templates you can edit and extend, a project dashboard, the AI update review and register, contributor and client portals with one-tap responses, nudges with a configurable cadence, and the weekly report. Workspace owners choose the AI model and can add their own house guidance to every prompt.

Data is hosted in Sydney, Australia. Contributors and clients never need an account, and never will. Keel is free while we are in beta.

What is next

Email delivery for invitations and nudges is the nearest thing — today you copy the link and send it yourself. After that: exportable reports and registers in the formats clients actually ask for, richer scope and decision history, and what-if scheduling so you can test a slip before you commit to it.

We build Keel at CXAI, a Sydney AI and automation consultancy, and we run our own client projects on it. That is the only product test we trust. If you run projects for clients and the Friday ritual sounds familiar, start a project and tell us where it falls short.