Project Charter Template Permalink

Use this template to take a project from a proposal to a signed charter. The project opens in Timeline view with the dependencies already wired, so the order a charter has to be written in is visible rather than assumed.

You can visit the Project Charter project and duplicate it to your workspace, so you don’t need to build everything from scratch.

You can also explore more ready-to-use templates to speed up your workflow.

Understand Project Charters

A project charter is the short document that turns a proposal into an approved project. It is written during initiation, before detailed planning, and its job is to get a decision rather than to guide the work.

The Five Questions

A charter answers five questions in one place.

1. Why are we doing this, and what happens if we don’t?
2. What will we deliver, and what are we deliberately not delivering?
3. Who does the work, who decides, who needs to be told?
4. What does it cost in money and people?
5. What could go wrong, and who owns that risk?

If you cannot answer all five, you do not have a project yet. You have an idea.

Charter, Business Case, or Project Plan

Three documents get confused with each other, and writing the wrong one wastes two weeks.

The most common charter failure is writing the third one by mistake: fifty pages of schedule detail that will be wrong within a month, handed to a sponsor who needed one page to make a decision.

Build the Charter in Six Sections

The template uses six sections in the order a charter is actually written. Each item inside them is a task with an owner and a due date, so the charter is tracked work rather than a document someone is meant to get around to.

The order is the point. Scope written before purpose tends to be a wish list, and budget estimated before scope is a guess. Section 2’s out-of-scope list is the one worth spending extra time on, because nobody argues later about what you promised. They argue about what they assumed.

Five tags cut across the sections: Charter Doc on anything that ends up in the final document, then Stakeholder, Budget and Risk for filtering by concern, and Milestone on the three key dates. Filter by Risk before a steering meeting and you have half your agenda.

Read the Charter in Timeline View

Timeline view and task dependencies are only available in the Professional, Premium, Enterprise plans. More information can be found on our pricing page.

Every task carries a start and a due date, so Timeline view is the default rather than an afterthought. The left grid pane keeps the section list in view while the bars show what overlaps what.

Dependencies

Eight task dependencies are wired across the six sections, covering the pairs where one piece of writing genuinely blocks another: objectives before scope, scope before the dependency log, the RACI before budget estimates, phase gates before the draft milestone, and sign-off before distribution.

That chain does two jobs. It makes the writing order enforceable instead of advisory, and it means dates move together: drag one bar and everything downstream follows, so a two-week slip on the business case shows up as a moved kickoff date rather than a surprise a month later.

Open any task and the same links appear as Predecessors and Successors, so you can see what is holding a task up without leaving the panel.

Note: Link only the pairs that genuinely block each other. A charter where every task depends on the previous one is a straight line, and a straight line tells you nothing about which delay actually matters.

Milestones

Three milestones sit in the timeline as diamonds: Charter draft complete, Charter approved by sponsor, and Project kickoff. Those are the only three dates your sponsor will remember, which is why they get their own sublist for upward reporting.

Move all three to your own dates before anything else. Everything in the template hangs off them, and because they are linked by dependencies, the tasks around them move too.

Tip: To shift the whole charter at once, select every task in Timeline view and drag the block to your real start date. The dependencies come along.

Cost, Effort and Roles in Table View

Table view is only available in the Professional, Premium, Enterprise plans. More information can be found on our pricing page.

Table view is where the charter turns into numbers. Three custom fields do the work, and the built-in approval state sits beside them as a fourth column.

• Charter Role is a select field with Project Sponsor, Project Manager, Team Lead, Subject Matter Expert and Stakeholder. It gives you a lightweight RACI without maintaining a second spreadsheet
• Estimated Cost is a money field holding the budget per deliverable
• Estimated Effort is a duration field holding hours, so you can check the plan against the capacity your team actually has free

Sum the Estimated Cost column and you have your budget line without a spreadsheet. Group by Charter Role and you can see whether one person is quietly carrying the whole charter.

Read more on our blog about choosing between RACI, DACI and RAPID.

Run Sign-off Through Approvals

The Approval feature is only available in the Premium and Enterprise plans. More information can be found on our pricing page.

Sign-off runs through Quire’s built-in Approval workflow rather than a custom status field, so an approval shows up in notifications and in the task’s activity feed instead of being buried in an email thread. Three categories come set up.

To request one, open the task, choose Request approval, and pick the category. The approver can approve, reject, or request changes, and the state shows on the task itself.

The template ships with requests already on nine tasks so you can see every state the workflow produces. Clear them after duplicating, then re-request as your own charter moves.

Note: Approval rosters are open by default, so anyone on the project can request or approve. Set claimers and approvers per category in project settings if a charter needs a locked-down chain.

Track Progress

The Blocked Column

In the Free Subscription plan, you can have up to 5 statuses in each project, and this template already uses all 5. Upgrade your subscription plan to create more statuses. More information can be found on our pricing page.

Five statuses carry a charter item from unwritten to approved: To-do, Blocked, In progress, In Review, and Completed. Open the project in Board view and shuffle the columns by Status to see where the charter is stuck.

Blocked is the one worth using honestly. It is for work waiting on someone outside your control, and an item that sits there for more than a few days has stopped being a delay and become a risk. Move it onto the risk register and give it an owner.

In Review matters almost as much, because most of a charter lives there for a week or two. Written but not approved is a real state, and collapsing it into either To-do or Completed hides where the charter actually is.

Charter Health Dashboard

Dashboard view is only available in the Professional, Premium, Enterprise plans. More information can be found on our pricing page.

The Charter Health dashboard answers the question a sponsor asks in one line: is this ready yet. Three widgets carry it.

• Approvals and Requests: what is waiting on a decision, and whose decision it is
• Task Status Distribution: how much of the charter is still unwritten versus in review
• Blocked Tasks: what is stuck and what it is waiting on, side by side

The Blocked Tasks widget pairs each stuck item with what it is waiting on, which is the view worth putting on screen at a steering meeting.

Charter Sublists

In the Free Subscription plan, you can create two sublists for each project, and this template already uses both. Upgrade your subscription plan to create more sublists. More information can be found on our pricing page.

Two sublists cut across the six sections.

• Key Milestones holds the three dates, for when you report upward
• Charter Content holds every task whose output gets written into the final document. Work that list and the one-pager writes itself

Both are filter-based, so they keep themselves current as tags and statuses change.

Start Your Charter

Everything on this page can be built by hand. The template is the same thing already assembled: six sections, five statuses, three custom fields, three approval categories, eight dependencies, three milestones and both sublists, filled in with sample dates running March to June 2027.

Duplicate the Project Charter project into your workspace, then change five things:

1. Rename the project, swapping Project Charter for the actual project name.
2. Select every task in Timeline view and drag the block to your real start date. The dependencies move with it.
3. Reassign the sample owners to your own team.
4. Clear the sample approval requests, then re-request them as your charter progresses.
5. Delete the sections you don’t need. A two-week internal project does not need a risk register.

Adapting It

• Under a month? Keep sections 1, 2 and 6. Delete the rest
• Regulated or high-budget? Keep everything, and add a compliance task under Section 4
• Agency or client work? Rename Section 3 to Client & Team, add the client’s approver to the RACI, and put payment milestones in Section 5
• Internal tooling? Section 2’s out-of-scope list is where you push back on feature creep, so be specific there

Revisit the charter at every phase gate. Charters go stale, and ten minutes of review at each gate saves two weeks of confusion later. Once the charter is signed, the RAID Log template picks up the risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies you logged in Section 4.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a project charter?

A project charter is the short document that turns a proposal into an approved project. It states why the work matters, what will and will not be delivered, who is accountable, what it costs, and what could go wrong.

What should a project charter include?

Purpose and business case, scope and deliverables, stakeholders and team, resources and budget and risks, and the timeline with its milestones. The order matters: scope written before purpose tends to be a wish list, and budget estimated before scope is a guess.

What is the difference between a project charter and a business case?

A business case argues that the investment is worth making and carries projected return and a fuller risk analysis. A charter assumes that argument is won and defines the project that follows. For small to medium investments a charter alone is usually enough.

What is the difference between a project charter and a project plan?

The charter comes first, is short, and is written for whoever approves the project. The plan comes after approval, is long, and is written for the people doing the work.

Who writes and who approves a project charter?

The project manager usually writes it and the sponsor owns it. Approval typically comes from three directions: the sponsor for the business case and risks, Finance for cost and effort, and affected stakeholders for scope and the RACI.

How long should a project charter be?

A few pages. The real test is whether the sponsor reads it before the meeting rather than during it. If a section is running long, detail from the project plan has usually migrated into it.

How do I build a project charter in Quire?

Create six sections in the order a charter is written, make each item a task with an owner and a due date, and add fields for role, cost and effort. Link the tasks that genuinely block each other so Timeline view draws the critical path, then use Approvals for sign-off.

How do task dependencies help in a project charter?

They make the writing order enforceable rather than advisory, and they keep dates honest. Drag one bar in Timeline view and everything downstream moves with it, so a slip early on shows up immediately as a moved kickoff date.

Is there a ready-made project charter template in Quire?

Yes. Visit the Project Charter project and duplicate it to your workspace to get the six sections, five statuses, three custom fields, three approval categories, eight dependencies and three milestones without building them yourself.