Calendar and delays

The Calendar shows a week at a time — one column per day, and every task running that day. Unlike the other Schedule views it is not limited to the job you have open: by default it shows every job you have access to, side by side.

What it is for

Answering “what is happening this week?” — across the whole business, not one job at a time. It is the view to have open on a Monday morning and the one to look at before promising anyone anything.

Three things it catches quickly:

• Two trades booked into the same space on the same day
• A day with nobody on site, which is usually a gap nobody planned
• Work that should have finished and has not, flagged in pink

Moving around

• ‹ and › step back and forward a week.
• This week jumps back to today. Today’s column is marked and highlighted.
• The date box jumps to whatever week contains the date you pick.

Weeks run Monday to Sunday. Weekends and company shutdown days are shaded, and a shutdown shows its name in the column heading.

Filtering

Two filters, both remembered between visits. By default neither is applied — the calendar opens showing everything you have access to.

Filter	What it does
Project	Selected Project (whichever is chosen in the left-hand menu) or All Projects
Site manager	Everything one person is running, across every project

Project is a two-way switch, not a second project list — which project “Selected Project” means comes from the project menu on the left, the same one every other page uses. With no project selected there, it stays on All Projects.

Site manager is the one worth knowing about. It is set per job, in Project Settings → Supervisor, and filtering by it gives a supervisor their own week across every job they are running rather than one job at a time. The number beside each name is how many jobs they are on.

There is deliberately no filter for job status, completion or archived jobs. The calendar shows every job you can see, whatever stage it is at — a job at Sales Estimate is still work in the diary, and completed tasks are the point of ticking them off, not something to hide.

An empty week tells you why

If a week comes back empty while a filter is narrowing it, the calendar names the filter and offers a Show everything button. An empty week with no such message genuinely has nothing scheduled.

Reading a task

Each task is a card in every day it runs, not just the day it starts. A card tells you which day of the run you are looking at:

• ▶ starts — work begins today
• day 3 of 8 — it is under way
• ■ finishes — the last day
• … — the run continues past this week

The coloured bar down the left is the project. The same job is the same colour every week, so you can pick one job out of a busy screen at a glance.

Cards also carry the supplier, the call-up status (Emailed, Supplier Confirmed, Declined), progress if it has started, and an Overdue flag if it should have finished and has not. A diamond ◆ means a milestone.

Click a card for the full detail — job number, site manager, booked versus planned dates, duration, supplier, call-up status — and a link straight to that job’s schedule.

Ticking work off

The box on the left of each card marks a task complete. Completed tasks turn teal, get a tick and are struck through, and the day’s count updates.

This is the one thing the calendar changes. It sets the task to 100% and records today as the finish date if none was recorded — nothing else moves, and no other task’s dates change.

Walk the site with the calendar open

Ticking work off as you see it is a thirty-second job that keeps the whole schedule honest. The alternative is reconstructing a fortnight of progress from memory.

Printing

Print produces the week as a page — filters, chrome and toolbars stripped, seven columns landscape. Useful for the site office wall or a subcontractor meeting.

What it is not for

Planning. Move a task in the calendar and nothing downstream follows, because the calendar shows dates rather than dependencies.

Plan in the Schedule, where a change flows through everything that depends on it. Use the calendar to read the result.

A job showing nothing

A job only appears once its schedule has dates. If one looks missing, open its Tasks tab once — that computes the dates — then come back.

Delays

Delay Type records why a task was held up, and the delay carries how long it lasted and what it affected — “affecting this task”, “and next”, “for the last”.

Record delays as they happen, with the cause. Weather, access, a trade not turning up, waiting on an inspection, waiting on the client to decide.

Record delays the day they happen

Nobody reconstructs a wet-weather record accurately in March for the previous October. Thirty seconds on the day is worth more than an afternoon at the end, and it is the difference between a claim you can support and one you cannot.

Why the delay record matters

Three reasons, in increasing order of money.

It explains the programme. A job four weeks late with eleven recorded wet days is a different conversation from a job four weeks late for no recorded reason.

It supports extensions of time. Most building contracts allow an extension for delays outside your control — weather, client decisions, latent conditions. Almost all of them require you to notify within a set period. A contemporaneous record is what makes the claim work.

It supports variation claims. A delay caused by a client’s late decision or a design change is often a compensable delay, and the record is the evidence.

Client-caused delays

The most valuable ones to record, and the ones most often left out because it feels awkward.

If a client takes three weeks to choose tiles and the tiler is standing by, that is a delay caused by the client. Record it at the time, and tell them at the time — politely, as information rather than a complaint.

A client who is told “we are holding the tiler, and each week costs us programme” usually decides faster. One who is told nothing is genuinely surprised when the finish date has moved.

Working days

The schedule works in working days, so weekends and non-working days are not counted as duration. A five-day task starting Thursday finishes the following Wednesday — and in the calendar it appears on all five working days plus the weekend it spans.

Where you know about a shutdown well ahead — the Christmas break in particular — account for it rather than letting the schedule run through it. A residential job crossing the summer shutdown without allowance for it is optimistic by two or three weeks before anything has gone wrong.

A weekly routine

1. Open the calendar on Monday, filtered to your site manager.
2. Check the week: who is booked, any clashes, any empty days, anything pink.
3. Confirm the big ones — pours, cranes, coinciding trades.
4. Tick off what finished last week; record last week’s delays, with causes.
5. Move anything that slipped in the Schedule, not here.