Construction Schedule

A free construction schedule generator that works out the critical path

List the tasks, how many working days each takes, and what has to finish first. This works out the dates, the float on every task and which chain of work actually controls the finish date — then hands you a CSV that opens in Excel.

What float is, and why it is the number that matters

Float is how many days a task can slip without moving the finish date. A task with fifteen days of float can go badly wrong and nobody notices. A task with zero float is on the critical path: one day late on it is one day late on the project.

This is the whole reason to draw a schedule rather than a list of dates. It tells you which of today's problems is worth dropping everything for and which one can wait a fortnight — and those are usually not the problems that are shouting loudest.

Why working days

Durations here are working days, so weekends are skipped. A five-day task starting Monday finishes Friday. It is the most common error in a schedule built by hand in a spreadsheet, and it compounds: ten tasks in sequence, each off by a weekend, is a finish date two weeks wrong.

Schedules and getting paid

Lenders and owners often want a current schedule with a draw, and the reason is not filing. They are checking one thing: whether the money is running ahead of the work. If you have billed 60% of the contract and the schedule says you are four weeks behind, that is the conversation on the next call.

It matters more where the contract has liquidated damages. A daily figure for finishing late is only meaningful against a completion date, and a schedule showing the date slipping is the earliest warning anybody gets. If your contract has an LD clause, keeping the schedule current is how you see the exposure coming rather than receiving it.

What it does not do

This is deliberately small. Finish-to-start links only, no lags, no resource levelling, no baseline-versus-actual tracking, one five-day working week. Anyone who needs those is running Primavera or Microsoft Project, and should. What this gives you is a defensible schedule with real float, in about ten minutes, for nothing.

It also does not tie the schedule to what you have billed. That comparison — billed against built, with the contract's completion date and LD rate alongside — is what the paid product is for.