What typing 50% into % Complete actually does to your schedule
It looks like the most harmless field on the row. You type 50, the bar fills halfway, everyone in the status meeting nods. In a scheduling tool that stores actuals, it is not harmless at all — that one number writes several other fields for you, and if you do not know which, your variance report will tell you a story you did not intend.
Here is what happens in Ingantt for Web and Android.
Above 0% sets the Actual Start
The moment a task goes above 0% complete, it has started, so Ingantt writes an Actual Start. Not a planned start — an actual one. If the task really began three days late, and you enter progress without correcting the Actual Start, the schedule now believes it began on time and finished slowly. Those are different problems with different fixes, and only one of them is yours.
100% sets the Actual Finish
Take a task to 100% and Ingantt writes an Actual Finish. This is the field your baseline comparison reads, so it is worth being right rather than quick.
Durations recalculate underneath
Actual Duration and Remaining Duration recalculate from the percentage. Half of a ten-day task is five days done and five to go — until you say otherwise. If the work is 50% done but the remaining half will take nine days rather than five, the honest edit is to Remaining Duration, not to % Complete. The percentage is an output of the truth, not a substitute for it.
Work follows only if you have asked it to
Actual Work and Remaining Work update from % Complete only when the project option "Updating task status updates resource status" is on. This is the setting that surprises people: progress looks tracked, effort and cost are not moving, and nobody can see why. If your earned value numbers look frozen, this switch is the first thing to check.
The practical version
- Enter progress against the Status Date you actually mean, not today's date by default.
- Fix Actual Start when a task started late. The percentage cannot carry that information.
- Push slippage into Remaining Duration, not into a lower percentage.
- Decide once whether task status should drive resource status, and leave it alone.
Ingantt's help centre has the detail on entering progress, on actuals and remaining columns, and on baselines — which is the comparison all of this eventually feeds.