Forum Discussion
Project-based relative dates
thanks for the quick response! I should have elaborated on similar projects: I actually meant scope of work type. For example, we do a lot of recurring work for a big client, whose different projects I have sorted into "customer" and "job type" for easy reference beyond job number, but even for those very similar projects scope-of-work-wise, we have had one recently that was 8 months, and a current one that is 6. A lot of the similarities between the two extend to that our labor is pretty consistent week to week, which forms the bulk of our variable costs.
So far, I've ended up doing something similar to what you suggested, within those "job types". I ended up establishing two new columns in the transaction file - "job day" (transaction date-start date), and "job week" (which i was able to bring up by using WEEKNUM on the "job day" column and adjusting it to suit whatever year that was calculated on (1900?), as a job day of "1" was originally returning "job week" of "53". Not the most elegant solution, but I think it will work for most of my comparative needs!
another thing you might consider once you've acquired some data
if you also categorize things like customer type/ type of work / number of employees etc
you might be able to do regression analysis to find out what characterized projects that are "unstable", or that have cost overruns, or whatever
then when a project starts you could predict a little whether it would be "normal" or "dangerous"