How BigWave Reports Pick the Dates They Measure
A work order rarely moves in a straight line. The quote goes out, the customer has a question, the quote goes out again, and the job sits on hold for a week before anyone says yes. Ask BigWave how long that quote took and the report still has to settle on one start date and one end date.
Where the dates come from
Each time a work order changes status, BigWave writes the change into that work order’s audit trail. It keeps the new status, the date and time, and the name of the person who made the change. Reports read that trail.
Every company names its statuses its own way, though. One says Quote Submitted. Another says Bid Out. So reports measure between milestones, a short fixed list of steps that mean the same thing in every company: Quote Sent, Quote Approved, Work Completed and a few more.
You tell BigWave which of your statuses stands for which milestone. An administrator does this once, in the Reports area under Setup, on the Milestone Mapping tab. Each status name gets set one time and covers every project. The list also shows old statuses you stopped using, so older work orders still count. A status left as Not Mapped counts toward nothing.
Your office moves the work order to Quote Submitted.
The audit trail gets a new line: Quote Submitted, March 2 at 10:14 AM, by Jan Smith.
You mapped Quote Submitted to Quote Sent, so reports read this line as "the quote went out."
It finds the date each work order reached each milestone and measures the time in between.
When a work order moves in order, that’s all there is to it. The questions below come up when its history gets messy.
A work order went into the same status more than once. Which date counts?
The first one.
Say you mapped Quote Submitted to the Quote Sent milestone, and a work order moves like this:
- Quote Submitted on March 2
- Info Required on March 3
- Quote Submitted on March 6
- On Hold on March 9
- Quote Submitted on March 12
Reports say the quote went out on March 2. The trips back on March 6 and March 12 don’t move that date. When someone asks “when did we send the quote?” they almost always mean the first time.
How are the days between two milestones counted when a status repeats?
The report takes the first date of the starting milestone. Then it looks for the first date of the ending milestone that falls on or after that start.
Here’s a work order with a quote sent twice and approved twice:
- Quote sent on March 1 and again on March 10
- Quote approved on March 5 and again on March 20
The report counts March 1 to March 5, which is 4 calendar days. March 10 and March 20 play no part.
The Days Between Two Statuses report measures between any two of your own statuses, say Quote Submitted to Scheduled. The same rule holds there.
What if the ending milestone came before the starting one?
Then the report can’t measure that work order, so it leaves it out of the figure.
For example, a work order reached Quote Approved on March 5 and Quote Sent on March 8. No approval came after the quote went out.
To see which work orders a figure left out, click Chart Data and then click a row. The work orders behind that figure open in their own window. The ones the report skipped appear under Left out of the figure, each with a reason such as “reached Quote Approved only before Quote Sent.”
A work order that never reached the starting milestone at all shows up there too. Its reason lists any statuses it went through that nobody has mapped yet. Often one of those is the milestone under a name you forgot to map.
I mapped two statuses to the same milestone. Which one counts?
Whichever one the work order reached first.
Say you mapped both Work Completed and Job Done to the Work Completed milestone. A work order reached Job Done on June 3 and Work Completed on June 7. It counts as completed on June 3.
Which month does a work order count in?
The month it reached the ending milestone.
A quote sent on March 28 and approved on April 2 counts in April.
That way a month’s figure stops changing once the month is over. Counting by the start date instead would make the newest month look fast, because only its quick quotes would be approved yet.
How are the days themselves counted?
Reports count the real time that passed, to one decimal. A quote sent at 4 PM and approved at 9 AM the next morning took 0.7 days.
You can switch any of these reports between two ways of counting:
- Calendar days count every day.
- Business days skip Saturdays, Sundays and company holidays.
A quote sent Friday at 4 PM and approved Monday at 9 AM took 2.7 calendar days, or 0.7 business days. The Request to Quote report opens in business days, since quoting is office work. The others open in calendar days.
Business days skip only holidays set for the whole company. A day off entered for one person doesn’t count. If you have very few company holidays, the Company Holidays tab under Setup warns you, because business days will treat your statutory holidays as work days until you add them.
Is there a status where the latest one matters instead of the first?
Yes, Cancelled.
Map your cancelled statuses to the Cancelled milestone. Reports then leave out any work order that is cancelled right now. If you reopen a cancelled work order, it shows up in reports again.