The Gantt

The Schedule view is the Gantt chart — tasks as bars along a timeline, with the dependencies drawn between them.

It is the only view that answers “when will we be finished?”, because it is the only one that understands what depends on what.

Move a task and everything depending on it moves with it.

Reading it

Each task is a bar: its position is when it happens, its length is how long it takes. Lines between bars are dependencies.

Working left to right along the linked bars shows you the chain that determines the finish date.

The chart shades the days the site does not work — this job’s non-working days and the company holidays — so a bar that stretches over a weekend or the Christmas break is visibly doing so. Which days count is set under Calendar — see Working days.

Zooming in and out

Day, Week, Month, Quarter and Year, on the chart’s toolbar, set how much of the job fits on the screen. Day is for sorting out the next fortnight; Quarter shows whole quarters and Year at least twelve months, which is the view for “how does the whole job sit?”

The zoom you pick is remembered in your browser. Groups you fold away are remembered too, for each job, so a long schedule opens the way you left it.

Trade double-booked

A small orange warning triangle beside a task’s name means that task’s trade is also booked on another of your jobs on overlapping days. The trade is the supplier on the task — from its person, or from its purchase order. Hover the triangle, or open the task, to see which job and which days.

Overlaps inside the same job are ignored, and so are finished tasks. The other job is only named if you have access to it. Like the Calendar’s clash warning, it means “check”, not “wrong” — a bigger trade may run two crews.

Today

Today’s column is shaded blue from top to bottom, and its date in the header is solid blue, so “where are we against the plan” is the first thing you see. The chart always stretches far enough to include today, even on a job that has not started yet or finished long ago.

Today, above the chart, scrolls straight back to it after you have wandered off along the timeline.

The weather row

Above the bars, in the Day and Week zooms, is a row of forecast icons — one per day for the next week or so. Hover any of them for the detail: what it will do, the temperature range, the chance of rain, how much, and the wind when it is strong enough to matter.

A day the forecast expects to be wet is shaded yellow. That means a 50% or better chance of rain, or 5mm or more — roughly the point at which a pour or a roof gets moved. It is a warning, not a rule: nothing on the schedule changes and no date moves.

The forecast is for the site. It comes from the project’s postcode, set under Edit Project — or, for an older project that has not been re-saved since, from a suburb or postcode in its address lines. Two things follow from that:

• A project with no suburb or postcode gets no icons, and the row says so. Add them under Edit Project and the forecast follows the site.
• The row only appears in the Day and Week zooms. From Month out, a day column is a few pixels wide, which is not enough for an icon to mean anything.

The forecast keeps itself current. A page left open checks again every few hours, and as soon as a new day starts — so a Gantt left up on the office screen overnight shows today’s outlook in the morning, not yesterday’s. Refresh weather, above the chart, gets the latest straight away.

Days beyond the forecast simply have no icon. That gap is the honest answer — a ten-day outlook does not exist yet.

The critical path

The critical path is the longest chain of dependent tasks through the job. Every task on it directly determines the completion date: delay one by a day and the job finishes a day later.

Tasks off the critical path have float — slack before they start affecting anything.

This is the most useful single idea in scheduling, because it tells you where to spend your attention.

Worked example

From the extension schedule, after frame inspection two chains run in parallel:

Chain	Tasks	Total
A	Roof trusses (2) → Roof tiles (3, +1 lag) → Windows (2) → Cladding (5)	13 d
B	Plumbing rough-in (3) → Insulation (1) → Plasterboard (5)	9 d

Chain A is critical. Chain B has four days of float.

So if the plumber is two days late, it costs nothing — there is float. If the roof tiler is two days late, the job finishes two days later.

That tells you exactly who to ring on Monday morning, and it is not obvious from a task list.

Chase the critical path, not the loudest problem

The trade making the most noise is rarely the one determining your finish date. Look at the Gantt before deciding what to chase.

Planned against booked

Booked, on the chart’s toolbar, draws each task’s booked dates — the ones on Bookings — as a thin blue line under its planned bar. Where the two sit apart, the trade has been told one thing and the programme now says another. That is the one to ring about.

Baselines: planned against what you promised

A baseline is a snapshot of the programme on a given day. Save one when the client agrees the programme, and from then on the chart shows how far the job has moved from it.

Under Baseline on the chart’s toolbar:

• Save today’s plan as a baseline… — give it a name, such as Contract programme.
• Pick which saved baseline to compare with, or No baseline to hide it.
• Delete one you no longer need.

Each job keeps its five newest baselines.

With a baseline chosen, a thin grey line above each bar shows where that task sat in the baseline. Hover it for the difference in working days — 3 days later than baseline. The task panel shows the same as a tag (5d later than baseline or On baseline), and the summary on the top toolbar gives the whole job, such as · 4 days behind baseline.

Slippage becomes visible as a pattern rather than a series of individual excuses. Three trades in a row starting two days late is not three unrelated problems — it is a schedule that was optimistic from the slab onwards.

Save a new baseline after an approved variation

When a variation that adds time is approved, the programme the client agreed to has changed. Save a new baseline — After variation 3, say — so “behind” measures you against what was actually agreed, not against a programme that no longer applies.

Adjusting

Drag a bar to move a task, or change its duration. Anything depending on it follows.

That is the whole reason to work here rather than in the Calendar. Moving a date in the calendar changes one task; moving it here moves everything that depends on it, which is what actually happens on site.

Undo

The round-arrow Undo button on the top toolbar — or Ctrl+Z when you are not typing in a box — takes back your last change to this job’s schedule. Hover the button first: it names what it will undo, such as Undo: Deleted “Frame”. Press it again to go further back.

It covers task edits and deletes, links, delays, holidays, the working week, stages, paste and import template, build from cost codes, clear schedule, MS Project import, adding tasks from purchase orders, and ticking a task done on the Calendar.

It will not undo, and says why, when:

• someone else made the last change — only they can undo it;
• the schedule has changed since on another screen, the Calendar, the phone app or through a call-up — undoing would throw that work away;
• you are trying to go back past an undone Clear, Import or Build — those bring the tasks back as new copies, so there is no earlier version to return to.

Call-up statuses and emails are never undone — an email cannot be unsent. Company-wide holidays are not part of a job’s undo either.

Ordering the task list

The handle at the left of a row — the six dots — moves the task itself rather than its dates. Where you drop it decides what happens:

Drop it	What happens
On the top edge of another task	It lands immediately above that task, alongside it
On the bottom edge	Immediately below it, alongside it
In the middle of another task	It becomes a sub-task of that one

The middle of a row is the useful one: it groups work under a summary task without opening the task and setting its Parent by hand. A task cannot be dropped into its own sub-tasks, so you cannot lose a branch inside itself by accident.

Add sub-task on a row creates a new task already parented underneath it. Any task with sub-tasks gets a small arrow to fold them away, which is what keeps a long job readable when you only care about the stage you are on.

Group before you fix dates

Getting the structure right first — stages as parents, the real work underneath — makes everything after it easier: the critical path reads properly, printing collapses to something a client can follow, and moving a whole stage becomes one drag instead of eleven.

When something slips

1. Update the task that slipped — actual dates, or a longer duration.
2. Let the schedule reflow.
3. Look at the new finish date.
4. If it has moved and that matters, look at the critical path for where to recover time.
5. Tell the client if the completion date has moved.

Step five is not optional on a contract with a completion date. A client told at the time is managing an expectation; one told at the end is being presented with a fact.

Recovering time

Only two things shorten a job, and both apply to the critical path:

• Shorten a task — more people, longer days, a different method.
• Overlap tasks — start something before its predecessor fully finishes, where it is safe to. A start-to-start link with some lag does this without typing dates — see Link types.

Shortening a task with float achieves nothing at all. This is the most common wasted effort in running a programme.

Printing and sharing

Reports › Print or save as PDF… prints the chart landscape — the task list on the left, the bars scaled to fit the page. Print the whole job, a two-, three- or six-week lookahead for a site meeting, or dates you choose. Choose Save as PDF as the printer to get a file. See Reports and printing for the options and for the job and all-jobs reports.

For a client, a stage-level print is usually right — they want the shape and the finish date, not sixty bars. A client with portal access can also see the schedule online — see Overview.

To hand the programme to someone who works in Microsoft Project, use Schedule › Export to MS Project instead — see MS Project.

On a phone

On a phone the chart does not fit, so the Schedule shows task cards instead. Each card has the dates, the working days, a progress bar, the trade and any tags — Critical, Late, a delay, Trade double-booked — and a tick to mark it done.

Filter the cards with Unfinished, Next 2 weeks, Late or All. Tap a card to open its task panel full screen.