First Steps
You can read the window KOSMA opens with — your projects, your account, your licence — and know which column answers which question.
This is the window KOSMA opens with. **It is not where you work — it is where you choose what to work on.**
It holds three things and only three: your **projects**, your **account**, and your **licence**.
KOSMA has exactly two: this one, and one per open project.
Opening a project does not replace this window. It opens a second one and leaves the Project Manager behind it, which is what lets several productions be open at once. Close a project window and you are back here; nothing was lost, because this window never went away.
Everything else you meet — settings, dialogs, reports — appears **inside** one of those two. There is no third.
The list fills the window, and it is the only place every project you can reach is shown together.
| Column | What it tells you | | ------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Name** | what the project is called | | **Created** | the date the project was made | | **Last Open** | the last time *you* opened it — not the last time anyone changed it | | **Role** | **Owner** or **Guest** — your role in that project, not the project's kind | | **Members** | the other people on the project |
**Last Open is the column most often misread.** It answers *when did I last look at this*, not *is this still current*. A project a colleague changed this morning still shows the date **you** last opened it.
**There is no column for when a project last changed.** If you are working out which of three budgets is the live one, the list will not tell you — you have to open them. That is a known gap, not a setting you have missed.
Type in **Search…**, above the list. It filters as you type and matches across every column, so a producer's name or a year narrows the list as readily as the project name does.
The two buttons above the list switch between them. Archived projects are hidden from the main list and not deleted — see [archive and restore a project](/kb/article/archive-and-restore-a-project), and [delete a project](/kb/article/delete-a-project) for the difference that matters.
**A project lives on the KOSMA server; the work inside it happens on your machine.** That one split explains most of what you will notice here:
- Creating, renaming, archiving or deleting a project **needs a connection** — each changes the project, and the project is on the server. - Opening a project you have already used **does not**. Its budgets and plans are on your machine, and you can keep working on them offline.
So a lost connection stops you reorganising your projects, and does not stop you working in one.
**Account Admin** and **Upgrade License** are links to the KOSMA website. Either opens your browser; the change is made there, not here. The licence the app shows catches up when you come back to it — see [what your licence includes](/kb/article/what-your-licence-includes).
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