The Planning & Tasks tab is the first stop once a job lands in Project WIP. It's where you break the job down into the pieces of work that need to happen, set target dates, assign owners, and turn any of it into tasks for your team. This is what powers the job's health and "current task" indicators everywhere else in RiffleCM.
The Basics
When a job moves into Work in Progress, Riffle automatically adds a set of common deliverables and tasks to get you started. You can keep them, rename them, delete the ones you don't need, and add as many as the job requires. Everything saves automatically as you work — there's no save button.
Tip: Keep your deliverable dates up to date. Riffle uses them to track progress, flag jobs that are slipping, and show the "current task" on each job in your Project WIP list.
Deliverables and Line Items
Planning is organized in two levels:
Deliverables: the major pieces of work on the job (for example, a phase, an area of the building, or a scope of work). Think of these as your headings.
Line items: the individual to-dos that sit under a deliverable. Click a deliverable to expand it and add line items beneath it.
For each deliverable you can set:
Name: describe what the work is.
Owner: the team member responsible.
Planned Start and Planned End: your target dates.
Actual Start and Actual End: when it really happened, so you can compare plan vs. reality.
Deliverables:
Deliverable with opened line items:
Riffle also shows a running count of how many line items sit under each deliverable.
Marking Work Complete
As work gets done, check off line items one at a time, or use the Mark all items complete action on a deliverable to clear the whole group at once. When every item under a deliverable is complete, the deliverable turns green so finished work is easy to spot at a glance. You can always un-mark it if something needs to reopen.
Turning Work into Tasks
When you want someone to actually act on a piece of work, you can create tasks right from your planning:
Create a task from a single line item: opens a task pre-filled from that item, so you just confirm the owner and due date.
Create tasks for a whole deliverable: spins up an individual task for each line item, assigned to its owner, under it in one step.
Tasks stay linked back to the line item they came from, so progress in one place is reflected in the other.
Note: To create tasks for a whole deliverable, every line item under it needs an owner first. If an item has no owner assigned, Riffle will prompt you to set one before it can create the tasks. Assigning a task to someone other than the deliverable or line item owner will not change the owner on this page.
Reordering, Organizing, and Deleting Line Items
Drag a deliverable by its handle to reorder it, so your plan reads in the sequence the work actually happens. Add new deliverables at any time as the job evolves, and remove ones you no longer need.
Remove a line item or deliverable group by pressing the Remove icon.
Tips
Set planned dates early. They feed the Schedule view and the job-health tracking, and they're what make the rest of Riffle work for you.
Assign an owner to each deliverable up front so you can turn the work into tasks without backtracking.
Update actual dates as work happens so you can see, job over job, where things tend to run long.
Related: View Your Project Schedule