Manage project status and progress

Every project carries a status and a progress percentage. The status is something you set; progress is something Onplana calculates for you from the project’s tasks.

The five statuses

• Planning: the project is being scoped and has not started.
• Active: work is underway.
• On Hold: work is paused but expected to resume.
• Completed: the work is done.
• Cancelled: the project was stopped and will not be finished.

You change the status from the project’s actions menu via Edit Project, which also covers name, dates, budget, and other details.

Which status changes are allowed

Most status changes are allowed in any direction, including putting a project back to Planning or taking it off On Hold. Two direct jumps are blocked because they skip a step that matters:

• Planning to Completed: work that never went Active should not jump straight to done. Move the project to Active first.
• Cancelled to Completed: a cancelled project must be reopened (set it Active) before it can be marked Complete.

If you try one of these, Onplana rejects the change and tells you which intermediate step to take.

Note

Cancelling a project freezes its progress at the value it had at that moment, so reports keep an honest record of where the work stopped. Reopening the project unfreezes it and recalculation resumes.

How progress is calculated

Project progress is derived from the project’s tasks and is recalculated automatically every time a task changes. You do not maintain it by hand, and any manual tweak is overwritten the next time a task is created, updated, or completed.

The calculation works in one of two ways:

• Effort-weighted: when every task carries an estimated-hours value (typical for schedules imported from Microsoft Project), each task contributes in proportion to its estimated effort. A 40-hour task moves the needle more than a 2-hour one.
• Count-based: when some tasks have no hour estimates (typical for projects built directly in Onplana), progress is the share of tasks that are Done.

Milestones are excluded from the math, and in hierarchical schedules the calculation walks the lowest-level tasks so summary rows do not distort the number.

Tip

If your progress number feels coarse, add Estimated hours to your tasks. Once every task has an estimate, progress switches to the effort-weighted calculation and reflects the real size of each item. See Work with tasks.

FAQs

Why can’t I type a progress percentage on the project? Progress is a calculated rollup, not an opinion field. Keeping it derived from task state means two projects at 60% are comparable, and nobody can nudge a number without the underlying work moving.

Why did progress change when I added new tasks? Adding tasks grows the denominator. A project at 50% with 10 tasks drops when you add 10 more, because there is now more known work. That is the calculation being honest, not a bug.

Does marking a project Completed require 100% progress? No. Completed is a status you set; progress is calculated separately. The Projects page only treats a project as fully finished (for its hide-finished default) when it is both Completed and at 100%.