> ## Knowledge Base Index > Fetch the complete knowledge base index at: https://help.netnet.app/sitemap.xml > Use this file to discover available pages before exploring further. > Pure-Markdown content can be obtained by appending a '.md' suffix to the content URLs listed in the sitemap (without the trailing slash). # Deliverables: Status, Due Dates, and Confidence Explained **In brief:** A Deliverable carries a status, a due date, and a Confidence call, plus effort pools by service type that are budgets, never ceilings. **Applies to:** Everyone in the workspace. Confidence is the Job Lead's call and nothing calculates it. **See also:** Plan Stepper: How to Build a Job Plan Step by Step covers where Deliverables are built, and Job Tasks: Assignees, Allocations, and Statuses covers the work that happens inside them. **A Deliverable is the unit Net Net measures, and its row tells you where the work stands without you opening anything: Name, Status, Due, and Confidence, plus a Chat indicator. Expand it and you get the effort pools by service type, with Estimated, Assigned, and Actual hours side by side, and the tasks underneath. Those pools are budgets, not ceilings. Net Net will never stop you assigning or logging more hours than you planned. It just makes the overage impossible to miss.** You'll find them under **Jobs → your Job → Tasks**. # Why the Deliverable is the unit Tasks are how work gets done, and [Job Tasks: Assignees, Allocations, and Statuses](https://help.netnet.app/en-us/article/job-tasks-assignees-allocations-and-statuses-1fy1ov5/) covers that side of it. Deliverables are how work gets understood. A task is one person doing one thing. A Deliverable is a promise: Discovery, Homepage Design, Migration, Launch. It is the level a client recognizes, the level you priced at, and the level Net Net reports on. When a Job goes sideways, it goes sideways in a specific Deliverable, and that is where you want the signal to appear. Breaking work into units that hold up under scrutiny takes some practice, and we wrote about one way to think about it in [atomic web design as a workflow management approach](https://hellonetnet.com/atomic-web-design-6-steps-to-maximize-workflow-management/). # The Deliverable header The header is a fixed-height row and it does not change size when you expand it. Scanning a list of Deliverables should tell you where things stand without opening any of them. ## Name Click the caret to expand and collapse. The name itself is the Deliverable, in your language, not the software's. ## Status A dropdown with three values: * **Backlog**, not started * **In Progress**, underway * **Completed**, done You set Status by hand. Nobody's Deliverable should quietly change state because a task somewhere moved. ## Due The Deliverable's due date, using the standard Net Net date picker. Every Deliverable needs one before the Job can be [activated](https://help.netnet.app/en-us/article/activating-a-job-what-happens-when-the-plan-locks-15b8p4o/), because a Deliverable with no due date can never be late and therefore can never tell you anything. You can change a due date on an Active Job without a [Change Order](https://help.netnet.app/en-us/article/change-orders-how-to-add-scope-to-a-locked-job-plan-1gplwsw/). Dates are not part of the frozen plan. ## Confidence **Confidence is a human call, made by hand.** It is the Job Lead's honest read on whether this Deliverable is going to land. Four values: * **Not set**, the default * **High** * **Medium** * **Low** Nothing calculates Confidence and nothing overrides it. That is the point of it. The numbers know how many hours have been logged against how many were planned. They do not know that the client has gone quiet, that the developer you need is out next week, or that the approval everyone is assuming will be quick is not going to be quick. You do. || Confidence is manual by design. It feeds reporting and everything in [How Performance Works: Effort, Timeline, and Drift](https://help.netnet.app/en-us/article/how-performance-works-effort-timeline-and-drift-ikzayn/), so a Low set early is not an admission of failure, it is the earliest useful signal you have. The numbers tell you what has happened. Confidence tells you what is about to. | Set Confidence when something changes, not on a schedule. A Deliverable that has been High for three weeks and is still High tells your team nothing. One that moves to Medium the day scope gets fuzzy tells them everything. ## Chat indicator Always visible, and it tells you the state of conversation on this Deliverable without opening it: 1. **A green number** means unread messages that mention you, and it takes priority over everything else 2. **A white dot** means unread messages that do not mention you 3. **A normal icon** means conversations exist with nothing new 4. **A muted icon** means no chats yet The total message count lives inside the Chat panel, not on the icon. How Deliverable conversations sit alongside Job channels and DMs is covered in [Chat Layout: Stream, General, Job Channels, and DMs](https://help.netnet.app/en-us/article/chat-layout-stream-general-job-channels-and-dms-1j8b1n5/). # Expanding a Deliverable Expand a Deliverable and three things appear. ## Effort pools by service type One meter per service type on this Deliverable, drawn from the categories you set up in [Service Types and Service Groups: What Each One Does](https://help.netnet.app/en-us/article/service-types-and-service-groups-what-each-one-does-y89pui/), each showing three numbers: * **Estimated**, what you planned, frozen at activation and changed only by [Change Orders](https://help.netnet.app/en-us/article/change-orders-how-to-add-scope-to-a-locked-job-plan-1gplwsw/) * **Assigned**, the effort committed to tasks so far * **Actual**, the hours logged against those tasks The meter reads Actual against Estimated at a glance, and the line underneath spells all three out. ### Pools are budgets, not ceilings This is the rule people get wrong about Net Net, so it is worth being blunt. **Net Net will not stop you.** If a Deliverable has 5 hours of Design in the plan and the work needs 25, you can assign 25 and log 25. Nobody is blocked, no approval is required, no task is refused. The meter simply goes past 100% and the overage is there for anyone to see. There is one real constraint, and it is about structure rather than capacity: **a task must use a service type that exists on its Deliverable, with an estimated pool greater than zero.** You cannot invent a service type mid-flight that was never planned for. But once a service type is on the Deliverable, remaining hours are never a gate. ||| Do not read a red meter as a failure and do not read it as a blocker. It is information. An overage caught in week two is a conversation with the client, while the same overage discovered at invoicing is a write-off, and that gap is the entire reason the number is visible. The honest version of what these pools do: they turn effort into something you can see while there is still time to act on it, so the work stays in Flow instead of drifting quietly and surfacing as a surprise. ## Details A collapsible **Details** section holds the metadata that does not belong in the execution view: **Deliverable Type** answers "what are we delivering?" at a reusable level: Website Build, SEO Sprint, Brand System. It is optional, editable at any time, and suggests previous entries as you type. Its job is to group similar Deliverables across different Jobs so that later you can compare how the same kind of work behaved for three different clients. Where that list comes from is explained in [Deliverable Types and Setting Your Primary Industry](https://help.netnet.app/en-us/article/deliverable-types-and-setting-your-primary-industry-1v0aa7o/). **Hybrid Delivery** is where you record how much of this work AI actually did. Toggle it on and you get a row per service type where you note a short description and the AI contribution in hours. Hybrid Delivery is additive and never touches the plan. Actual always means human time. AI hours sit alongside it, they do not replace it, and they never change your pools or your capacity. If your firm does not use AI on a Job, none of this appears. ## Tasks The task table for this Deliverable. Tasks that support the Job as a whole rather than any one Deliverable, like coordination and client communication, live in **General Job Tasks** instead, which is one of the topics in [Job Tasks: Assignees, Allocations, and Statuses](https://help.netnet.app/en-us/article/job-tasks-assignees-allocations-and-statuses-1fy1ov5/). # Where drift shows up The Deliverable row is a working surface. The measurement surface is the Performance tab on the Job, walked through in [Reading the Job Performance Tab: Plan, Actual, Drift](https://help.netnet.app/en-us/article/reading-the-job-performance-tab-plan-actual-drift-1hi6cta/). There you get **Deliverable Drift**, sorted largest overage first, so scope movement surfaces immediately. Each row shows the Current Plan hours, the Actual hours, an effort meter, and how the due date is tracking, with overdue Deliverables called out in red. Once you can see it, [Responding to Drift: What You Can Actually Do](https://help.netnet.app/en-us/article/responding-to-drift-what-you-can-actually-do-11ksmrx/) covers the moves available to you. That separation is deliberate. Tasks is where you work. Performance is where you find out what the work cost. # Projects and Retainers Deliverables behave the same in both, with two differences. **In a Project,** a Deliverable can have a duration and a dependency on another Deliverable, and it appears as a bar on the Timeline you draw in [Plan Stepper: How to Build a Job Plan Step by Step](https://help.netnet.app/en-us/article/plan-stepper-how-to-build-a-job-plan-step-by-step-95jz87/). **In a Retainer,** Deliverables have no duration and no dependencies, because there is no sequence. Their pools describe one month of capacity, and each cycle is its own window with its own actuals, as described in [Running Retainers: Monthly Cycles, Tasks, and Actuals](https://help.netnet.app/en-us/article/running-retainers-monthly-cycles-tasks-and-actuals-sme359/). Look at March and you see March. # Frequently Asked Questions ###### What is the difference between Status and Confidence on a Deliverable? **Status is where the work is, Confidence is where it is going.** Status is Backlog, In Progress, or Completed and describes the present. Confidence is the Job Lead's manual forecast, Not set, High, Medium, or Low, on whether this Deliverable will land successfully. Both are set by hand, and neither is calculated. ###### Will Net Net stop me from going over the planned hours? **No. LOE pools are budgets, not ceilings.** You can assign and log more hours than you planned, on any Deliverable, at any time. The meter goes past 100% and the overage becomes visible, but nothing is blocked and no approval is needed. The only structural rule is that a task must use a service type that already exists on the Deliverable with an estimated pool above zero. ###### What do Estimated, Assigned, and Actual mean? **Estimated is what you planned, Assigned is what you have committed to tasks, and Actual is what has actually been logged.** Estimated is frozen at activation and only changes through a Change Order. Assigned tells you how much of the budget is already spoken for. Actual is real logged time, and it is always human time, with any AI contribution recorded separately under Hybrid Delivery. ###### Who sets Confidence on a Deliverable? **The Job Lead, by hand.** Nothing calculates it and nothing overrides it. It exists to carry the judgment the numbers cannot reach: a client going quiet, a dependency that is about to slip, an approval that will not be quick. Set it when something changes rather than on a routine. ###### Can I change a Deliverable's due date after the Job is Active? **Yes. Dates are not part of the frozen plan.** Due dates, Status, Confidence, Deliverable Type, and Hybrid Delivery all stay editable throughout the engagement. What is frozen is the estimated effort in the pools, and that changes only through a Change Order. ###### Where do I see whether a Deliverable is drifting? **On the Job's Performance tab, in Deliverable Drift.** It lists Deliverables with the largest overages first, showing Current Plan hours against Actual hours with an effort meter, plus how the due date is tracking, with overdue Deliverables in red. The Tasks tab is for doing the work, Performance is for measuring it. # Related articles Deliverables are built in [Plan Stepper: How to Build a Job Plan Step by Step](https://help.netnet.app/en-us/article/plan-stepper-how-to-build-a-job-plan-step-by-step-95jz87/) and executed in [Job Tasks: Assignees, Allocations, and Statuses](https://help.netnet.app/en-us/article/job-tasks-assignees-allocations-and-statuses-1fy1ov5/), so those two bracket everything on this page. If you are wondering why the Estimated column never moves on its own, [Baselines: Why Net Net Never Rewrites the Plan](https://help.netnet.app/en-us/article/baselines-why-net-net-never-rewrites-the-plan-1ep4h4s/) explains the reasoning. And when a teammate cannot log time against a task under one of these Deliverables, [Which Tasks Can Accept Time (and Which Cannot)](https://help.netnet.app/en-us/article/which-tasks-can-accept-time-and-which-cannot-ykihm4/) is usually the answer.