Add phases and activities
Break a job into phases and tasks, set durations and crew sizes, and let the man-day maths follow automatically.
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An activity is a piece of work with a duration and a crew size. Those two numbers are the whole engine: duration × crew size gives man-days, man-days drive the manload chart, and the working calendar decides which days count.
Phases are the grouping above activities — Site Prep, Foundation, Framing. They keep a long programme readable and give you something to collapse.
Open the job
From Jobs, select the job you want to build out. The job page holds its activities, its schedule and its own work-schedule settings.
Add a phase
Create the phases first if the job has them. An activity can then be filed under the right one as you go, which is much faster than reorganising afterwards.
Add an activity
Give it a name, a start date and a duration in working days. The finish date is calculated for you and skips weekends, holidays and shutdowns according to that job's calendar.
Set the crew size
Enter how many people the activity needs. This is what appears on the manload chart — leave it at zero and the activity will show on the schedule but contribute nothing to crew demand.
Add the rest in bulk
Use Batch add to paste rows straight from a spreadsheet rather than typing one at a time. Paste into any cell and the grid fills outward, adding rows as it needs them, and each row is validated before anything is created.
Worth knowing
- Duration is in working days, not calendar days. A five-day activity starting Thursday finishes the following Wednesday on a Monday-to-Friday week.
- If a date looks wrong, check the job's Work schedule before the activity — a job on a custom working week calculates differently from the workspace default.
Still stuck?
Tell us the job and the dates involved and we'll usually answer without a call.
Or email Support@tradeflowplanner.com