Baselines: Why Net Net Never Rewrites the Plan

In brief: Net Net freezes the Original Plan when a Job activates; only an applied Change Order moves the plan, and it moves Current Plan.

Applies to: Everyone in the workspace. The lock applies to every Job the moment it activates.

See also: Activating a Job: What Happens When the Plan Locks covers the moment the freeze happens, and Change Orders: How to Add Scope to a Locked Job Plan covers the only way past it.

Net Net freezes a Job's plan the moment it activates. That frozen number, the Original Plan, never changes again for the life of the Job, not by editing a Deliverable, not by an Owner override, not by anything except a Change Order. Every Change Order you apply adds to a second number, the Current Plan, and Net Net shows you both, always, so you can see what you committed to and how much the scope actually grew since.

This is the memory rule behind everything Performance shows you. If you understand this one idea, the rest of Performance reads itself. The two signals it feeds, effort and timeline, are explained in How Performance Works: Effort, Timeline, and Drift.

Why the plan has to lock

If a plan could be quietly edited after work started, it would always end up matching what actually happened, and an estimate that always matches reality has taught you nothing.

Net Net's plan lock exists to protect the one comparison worth having: what you thought this would take, against what it actually took. That comparison only means something if the first number can't move.

The lock itself, what triggers it and what it affects, is covered in Activating a Job: What Happens When the Plan Locks.

Two numbers, always

Original Plan is the snapshot taken the instant the Job activates. It is set once and never edited again, not even by an Owner.
Current Plan is the Original Plan plus every Change Order you have applied since. Nothing else moves it.

A Draft Change Order affects neither number. It sits to the side, fully built out and reviewable, until someone applies it.

This is why Deliverable Drift and the Job Performance tab both show Original Plan next to Current Plan rather than just one "plan" figure. The gap between them is the honest measure of how much the scope moved, separate from how the work itself is going.

How the plan actually gets protected

Before a Job activates, its Deliverables and their effort pools are wide open: add a Deliverable, change hours by service type, delete one, whatever the plan needs. Once the Job is Active, that door closes. Nobody can create, edit, or delete an effort pool directly anymore. The only path back in is a Change Order, which adds its hours to the pools it targets and is fully recorded as it does.

That's the mechanism behind the promise. It isn't a policy anyone has to remember to follow: the door is actually closed.

Change Orders preserve both truths

When a Change Order is applied, it updates the Current Plan without ever touching the Original Plan. You can always answer two separate questions:

How is execution going against what we're actually delivering right now? That's Current Plan versus Actual.
How much has the scope grown since we started? That's Original Plan versus Current Plan.

Full mechanics of building, applying, and reversing a Change Order are in Change Orders: How to Add Scope to a Locked Job Plan.

Remaining Effort

Remaining Effort is calculated the same way everywhere it appears in Net Net:

Remaining Effort = Current Plan minus Actual Hours Logged

Progress Confidence never changes this number. Confidence is a human read on how the work feels; Remaining Effort is arithmetic on what's actually been logged against what's actually been committed. Keeping those separate is deliberate: optimism should never quietly move a number that's supposed to reflect reality.

Why this matters beyond any one Job

When a Deliverable planned at 20 hours actually takes 30, that ten-hour gap doesn't disappear once the Deliverable closes. It's still there, in the Job's record, forever. The next time you scope something similar, you're pricing from evidence instead of from how you felt the last time you estimated.

That's the entire value of never rewriting the plan. An estimating process that can quietly correct itself after the fact never gets better. One that keeps the original number next to what actually happened does, every time. The same argument, made from the firm's side rather than the software's, is in Staying on Budget: How Measuring Estimate to Actual Improves Advertising Agency Efficiency.

If you want to see this play out across your whole Job history rather than one Job at a time, Jobs Report is the surface built for that lookup, Original Plan and Current Plan, side by side, for every Job you've run.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can an Owner edit the Original Plan directly if the estimate turns out to be wrong?

No, not even an Owner. Once a Job activates, nobody can edit effort pools directly anymore. The only way to add hours to the plan is a Change Order, which updates the Current Plan and leaves the Original Plan exactly as it was.

What's the difference between Original Plan and Current Plan?

Original Plan is the frozen snapshot from the moment of activation and never changes. Current Plan is the Original Plan plus every Change Order you've applied since. The distance between them tells you how much the scope has grown.

How is Remaining Effort calculated?

Current Plan minus Actual Hours logged, every time, everywhere it's shown. Progress Confidence, due dates, and anyone's opinion about how things are going never factor into this number.

Do Draft Change Orders affect the Current Plan?

No. Only applied Change Orders move it. A Draft can be built out completely and reviewed without touching either the Current Plan or the Job's performance numbers.

Why does Net Net bother keeping the Original Plan around once a Job is finished?

Because it's the only honest record of how good the original estimate was. If it got overwritten to match what actually happened, you'd have nothing to learn from the next time you price similar work.

Does completing a Deliverable early, before all the hours are used, change the plan?

No. Completing a Deliverable stops its timeline but doesn't touch Original Plan or Current Plan. Both stay exactly as they were; only the Actual and Remaining figures reflect where the work stopped.

The plan that gets frozen is the one you build in Plan Stepper: How to Build a Job Plan Step by Step, which makes it the article to read before you activate rather than after. Once a Job is running, Reading the Job Performance Tab: Plan, Actual, Drift is where Original Plan and Current Plan sit next to Actual, and Responding to Drift: What You Can Actually Do covers your options when Actual starts pulling away from either one. Job Lifecycle: Pending, Active, Completed, Archived puts the whole sequence in order.

Updated on: 08/04/2026

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