Planned vs Actual hours | Online help | Zoho Projects

Planned vs. Actual hours for tasks

Businesses need to continuously keep track of project costs to not only validate their plans, but also to ensure that project costs do not escalate. The Planned vs Actual report in Zoho Projects helps businesses compare their planned costs against the actuals. The report also displays the planned work hours against the actual time spent on tasks. The difference between the two can be used to check if the project is on track.

The Planned vs Actual report is available both at a portal level and at a project level.

Use-cases 

Construction: A site engineer has planned to complete the excavation of the project site within two days. If the excavation is completed within the stipulated time, the site engineer can track the difference in time and can specifically allocate the required time for similar tasks. 

Software development/ IT: The manager assigns an issue to be fixed to a developer and allocates a week's time to fix the issue. However, if the developer takes more than a week's time to fix the issue, the difference between the planned and actual hours taken can be viewed using this report.
 
HR: Time plays a key role in the written round of an interview process. When a program can be solved in half an hour, and if the candidate takes more than an hour to solve it, the difference can be looked into by the interviewer with this report. 


Benefits
  1. Allows users to identify project inefficiency.
  2. Users can be assigned tasks based on accurate time estimates.
  3. Keep track of the tasks ensuring on-time project delivery.  

  • Global Planned vs Actual Report is available in user based Enterprise plan.
  • Project Planned vs Actual Report is available in Premium and Enterprise plans.

Global Planned vs. Actual Report

View planned vs actual hours report of all users across all projects.

  1. Navigate to Reports in the left navigation panel.
  2. Select Planned Vs Actual from the drop-down.
  3. View the planned vs actual report for users by the week.
    You can change it to month view using the filter option. You can also filter the report by project groups, project name, users, and task status.
  4. Click on a user to view hours logged for individual tasks.
    1. The difference between the planned and actual hours is prefixed with a plus (+), if the planned hour is more than the actual hour.
    2. The difference between the planned and actual hours is prefixed with a minus (-), if the planned hour is less than the actual hour.
  5. Click on a task to view its details.
  6. Export the current view to an xls if needed.

Project Planned vs. Actual Report

  1. Click Projects in the left navigation panel and navigate to your project.
  2. Click Reports in the top band.
  3. Click the Planned vs Actual from the drop down.
  4. You can view the planned vs. actual hours for the project users and their respective tasks in the selected project. Click on the project user to expand and view the individual tasks.
    • The difference between the planned and actual hours is prefixed with a plus (+), if the planned hour is more than the actual hour.
    • The difference between the planned and actual hours is prefixed with a minus (-), if the planned hour is less than the actual hour.
    • You can change it to month view using the filter option. You can also filter the report by user and task status