Plan Stepper: How to Build a Job Plan Step by Step

In brief: The Plan Stepper builds a Job in four steps for a Project and three for a Retainer, auto-saving everything as you type.

Applies to: Anyone with a role that can create or edit Jobs. Planning is free and a Pending Job never bills.

See also: Projects vs Retainers: Choosing the Right Job Type covers the decision that drives every step, and Activating a Job: What Happens When the Plan Locks covers what happens at the end of it.

The Plan Stepper walks you through building a Job one decision at a time. Projects get four steps: Summary, Deliverables + LOE, Timeline, and Net Net. Retainers get three, because there is no Timeline to draw. Everything auto-saves as you type, so there is no Save button anywhere in Plan, and nothing is checked for completeness until you try to activate. The last step, Net Net, is where you see what you have actually planned before you commit to it.

You'll find it under Jobs → New Job, or on the Plan tab of any existing Job.

How the Plan Stepper behaves

A few rules hold across every step.

One step at a time. The stepper swaps the whole screen rather than scrolling a long form. You move with Back and Continue.

Auto-save, always. There is no Save button in Plan, because there is nothing to save manually. Type a number in a cell, move on, it is stored. Close the tab in the middle of Step 2 and come back tomorrow to exactly where you left it.

Partial is fine. You can leave fields blank, add three Deliverables now and two next week, and skip ahead to look at Net Net before the plan is finished.

Validation happens at activation, not as you go. Net Net does not nag you mid-plan. It checks the plan is complete at the moment you try to switch the Job on.

Because planning is free and auto-saved, there is no cost to roughing out a Job the day the conversation happens. Get the Deliverables down while the scope is fresh, then come back and put real numbers in the grid.

Step 1: Summary

The Summary step defines what this Job is.

Required:

Job Name
Job Number (auto-generated, editable)
Job Type: Project or Retainer, a choice explained in Projects vs Retainers: Choosing the Right Job Type
Client or Internal
Company (for Client Jobs), drawn from Companies, People, and Individuals: Contact Records
Job Lead, one of the roles described in User Roles Explained: Owner, Admin, Lead, and Member

Optional:

Person, the specific contact at that company
Team Members

Dates: the start date and, for Projects, the target end date. Both begin empty. Net Net does not pre-fill today's date, because a date you did not choose is a date nobody trusts later.

Retainers do not carry an end date. A Retainer runs until you archive it, so there is no target end date field to fill in.

Team Members chosen here are not locked in. Who is on a Job is editable at any time on the Settings tab, and it never requires a Change Order.

Step 2: Deliverables + LOE

This is the grid, and it is the heart of the plan.

Deliverables run down the left. Service types run across the top. The cells are hours.

That is the whole model. If the Homepage deliverable needs 12 hours of Design and 20 of Development, those two numbers go in two cells and Net Net keeps them separate forever after. The columns available to you come from Service Types and Service Groups, so it is worth having those set up before you plan.

Working in the grid:

Type a name and press Enter to add a Deliverable, and the cursor drops to the next row
Add a service type from the column header, with no modal in the way
Click a cell and type a number
Drag to reorder rows and columns
Row totals, column totals, and the grand total update as you type

Keyboard: Enter moves to the next row, Shift+Enter to the previous one, Tab to the next cell, Shift+Tab back.

Adding detail to a Deliverable

Click the info icon next to a Deliverable name to expand it. Clicking the name itself edits the name, it does not expand the row, and only one row expands at a time.

For Projects, the expansion holds a Description, a Duration with a Days, Weeks, or Months toggle, a Dependency on another Deliverable, and Internal Notes.

For Retainers, it holds a Description and Internal Notes. Duration and Dependency do not appear, because there is no sequence in a Retainer.

The reusable Deliverable Type label, the one that groups similar work across different Jobs, is not set here. It lives on the Tasks tab and is covered in Deliverable Types and Setting Your Primary Industry, along with everything else a Deliverable carries in Deliverables: Status, Due Dates, and Confidence Explained.

For Retainers, every number in this grid is monthly. It is not the total for the engagement, it is what a typical month looks like, and that reading carries all the way through to Net Net and to Performance.

Step 3: Timeline (Projects only)

The Timeline is a Gantt-style view of your Deliverables, and it exists only for Projects.

Deliverable level only. No task clutter, so the view stays readable.
Dependencies show as curved connectors between bars. Move an upstream Deliverable and downstream ones follow.
Drag the middle of a bar to move a Deliverable in time. Drag an edge to change its duration.
Zoom between Days, Weeks, Months, and Year, or use the slider for anything in between.
Start and Finish render as full vertical columns, not thin lines. No start date means no Start column, no end date means no Finish column.
Changing the start date shifts the timeline. Changing the end date moves the finish line.

Retainers skip this step entirely. It is not shown as disabled or as a placeholder, the stepper simply renders three steps instead of four. How a Retainer organizes work without a Timeline is covered in Running Retainers: Monthly Cycles, Tasks, and Actuals.

Step 4: Net Net

This is the moment before you commit, and it is where the plan stops being a grid and starts being a decision.

For a Project, Net Net shows:

Total project hours, all planned effort from Step 2
Duration, start to finish, drawn from the Timeline
Work intensity, expressed as hours per week
Service type breakdown
Revenue by service type
Revenue by deliverable
Total project budget

For a Retainer, the same picture, read monthly:

Total monthly hours
Weekly load derived from those monthly hours
Monthly service type breakdown
Monthly revenue by service type and by deliverable
Total monthly budget

Where the budget number comes from

Revenue is service type hours multiplied by your base rates, which you set alongside the service types themselves in Service Types and Service Groups: What Each One Does. That is all it is.

Net Net is deliberate about the framing: price it however you want, and based on your base rates, this is the expected budget. Net Net does the arithmetic. What you charge is a decision only you can make, and Net Net does not pretend otherwise. If you want to get better at the estimate itself over time, we wrote up the habits behind that in building better estimates for a creative or technical services firm.

Work intensity is the number most owners skip and then regret. A plan can look reasonable at the total-hours level and be impossible at the hours-per-week level, so if the weekly load is more than your team can carry, the honest fix is to change the plan or change the dates now, before anyone commits.

The two ways out of Net Net

At the bottom of the Net Net step there are exactly two actions.

Save as Pending returns you to your Jobs list. Nothing is committed, no billing starts, the plan stays fully editable, and you can come back to it whenever you like. Pending is the first stop in The Job Lifecycle.

Activate Job opens the Activation Review. This is the one-way door, and it is worth understanding before you push it. See Activating a Job: What Happens When the Plan Locks.

The Plan tab after activation

The Plan Stepper does not disappear once a Job is Active. It becomes read-only, and it stays there as the record of what you committed to. Anything you plan afterwards happens through Change Orders, which are additive and have their own stepper.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many steps are there in the Plan Stepper?

Four for Projects, three for Retainers. Projects go Summary, Deliverables + LOE, Timeline, Net Net. Retainers go Summary, Deliverables + LOE, Net Net, because a Retainer has no sequence to lay out on a Timeline. The Timeline step is not shown as disabled for Retainers, it is simply not part of the flow.

Where is the Save button in the Plan Stepper?

There isn't one, and that is intentional. Every input in Plan auto-saves as you work. Leave halfway through a grid, close the tab, come back tomorrow, and everything is where you left it.

Why is Net Net not stopping me from leaving fields blank?

Because completeness is only enforced at activation. Partial plans are allowed on purpose, so you can rough out a Job in five minutes and fill in the numbers later. When you try to activate, Net Net checks the plan and tells you specifically what is missing.

Are the hours in the grid monthly or total?

Total for Projects, monthly for Retainers. In a Project, the grid holds all the effort for the whole engagement. In a Retainer, the same grid describes one typical month of capacity, and that reading carries through to the Net Net step and to Performance.

How does Net Net calculate the project budget?

Service type hours multiplied by your base rates, set in Settings. It is the expected budget implied by your own rates, not a recommendation about what to charge. Price the work however you want.

What is the difference between Save as Pending and Activate Job?

Save as Pending keeps the plan editable and free, Activate Job commits it. Saving as Pending returns you to your Jobs list with nothing locked and nothing billing. Activating freezes the plan as your baseline, opens time logging and the execution tabs, and starts billing for that Job.

If you have not settled the shape of the work yet, Projects vs Retainers: Choosing the Right Job Type is the decision that drives every step here. Once the grid is filled in, Deliverables: Status, Due Dates, and Confidence Explained explains what each row becomes in delivery, and Activating a Job: What Happens When the Plan Locks takes it from plan to real work. After that, Reading the Job Performance Tab: Plan, Actual, Drift is where you find out how close your estimate actually was.

Updated on: 08/04/2026

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