The six views

Schedule & Booking is six views onto one set of tasks. They share the same underlying data, so a change in one appears in all of them.

View	What it is for
Tasks	The list. Add, edit and check off work.
Schedule	The Gantt — durations, dependencies, the critical path.
Calendar	What is happening on which day, across every job.
Call up	Telling subcontractors when to come.
Bookings	Who has confirmed.
Cash flow	What the job costs, over time.

The client can see a version of this

Share the schedule on the project’s Client portal card gives the client a read-only Schedule tab — stages, dates, percent complete and a running late flag. They never see task cost, suppliers, call-ups, delays, float or the critical path. It is off unless you turn it on. See Sharing documents, photos and selections.

Which to use when

Planning a job — start in Tasks to get the work down, then move to Schedule to give it durations and dependencies.

Running a week — Calendar and Call up. What is on this week, and who needs telling. The Calendar is the only view that spans every job at once, so it is also the answer to “what is my site manager doing this week?”

Checking a subcontractor is coming — Bookings.

Answering “when will we be finished?” — Schedule. The Gantt is the only view that answers it, because it is the only one that understands dependencies.

Answering “when do we need the money?” — Cash flow.

Do not try to plan in the calendar

The calendar shows what is scheduled; it does not understand why. Move a task there and nothing downstream follows. Plan in the Schedule, where dependencies mean a change flows through the rest of the job.

Tasks are the unit

Everything here is a task. A task can carry:

• a duration and dates
• predecessors, so it follows other work
• a cost center and a supplier, so it connects to the estimate
• a cost, or a link to an order
• a call-up period, so the subcontractor is told in time

The more of these you fill in, the more the other five views can do. A task with a name and nothing else appears in the list and does nothing anywhere else.

How much detail

Enough that each task is one trade’s work in one visit, and someone could be called up for it.

Too coarse	About right	Too fine
Build house	Frame — first floor	Install stud 14

Twenty to sixty tasks covers most residential jobs. Beyond a couple of hundred you spend more time maintaining the schedule than the schedule saves you.

Connecting to the rest of the job

The schedule is only worth keeping current if it connects to something. Three connections matter:

• Cost centers tie tasks back to the estimate
• Orders tie a task to what has been committed for it
• Contract stages can be linked to tasks, so reaching a stage flags the claim as due — see Contract stages

In this section

• Tasks
• Building a schedule
• The Gantt
• Resources and cost
• Call-up sheets
• Bookings and confirmations
• Calendar and delays
• Cash flow