Using calculated dates vs Actual dates from predecessors for date calculation

Jerry Tutt

When calculating dates, is there a way to use actual completion date instead of the past-due calculated date of the predecessor. If there is no actual date on the predecessor default back to the calculated completion date of the predecessor for the calculation.

I would appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks,

Jerry

Brian_Richardson

@Jerry Tutt

• There's nothing you can do, formula wise, with the Start and Finish dates on a task if you have dependencies enabled in the Gantt View settings. Once that's enabled, Smartsheet takes control of those fields and manages them through predecessors and rollups. You cannot put any formulas in those fields and you cannot do automations against them. So, if you're trying to automate or formula-drive changes to Start or Finish, you cannot.
• When setting a Predecessor, Smartsheet will lock the Start Date for the task that has a Predecessor to the finish date of the predecessor by default. You can double click the predecessor box, though, to change the type of relationship and add any lead/lag time if needed. You cannot, however, use formulas or automations on Predecessor cells, so it's manual.

So yeah... short story is you can't really do much to change how the start/end/predecessors are calculated.

You CAN, for reporting purposes, calculate and capture other dates in other date columns. If you want to work a formula that looks for predecessor information, though, it's a little complicated. You will need to setup an auto-number column to get a number on each row, then use that to match the predecessor number on the task to give you a row pointer, then look for the date information from the row.

Jerry Tutt

I was thinking that you could track calculated (planned finish) dates & actual finish dates (manually entered). We are doing that now. If a dependency has a calculated (planned) finish date of 08/09/22 but, it actually finishes on 09/12/22, it will use the 08/09/22 date to calculate the start date of its dependent task, which will result in a bad start date. For example: A Title Commitment & Survey must both be delivered before the client can study them and determine if they have any objections to either or both. The client has 30 days to decide if they object to anything. The Title Commitment & Survey were to be delivered by 08/09/22. However, they were actually delivered on 09/09/22. The schedule says that they must deliver the objections by 09/09/22, which is incorrect. They will actually have until 10/09/22, due to the late delivery. We could change the calculated complete date to be the actual delivery date. But we would lose the information that they delivered late, which could result in penalties. It seems like this is a weakness in the system.