Compare Lookahead to Master Schedule

Background

When you work in a Lookahead, you are managing a granular field plan that lives "on top" of the master schedule. To ensure the field team stays aligned with the project's overall goals, Procore uses Shadow Bars. These allow you to see the original master schedule dates behind your active field tasks, making it immediately obvious if your current plan is deviating from the master timeline.

Things to Consider

Color Logic:
- Colorful Bars: Represent your active field plan (the lookahead tasks).
- Light Gray Shadow Bars: Represent the dates currently set in the Master Schedule.
Dynamic Updates: If the Master Schedule is re-imported (Option 1) or edited, the gray shadow bars will shift automatically, while your colorful field bars remain in place for comparison.

Important

Updating an existing schedule: Re-importing completely overwrites and replaces the previously uploaded schedule—it does not append or add to existing data. You can upload updated files directly.
Uploading a schedule with different tasks: If your new schedule contains different/restructured tasks, you must Reset the Project Schedule first to avoid task-matching errors.

Steps

Enable Variance Visibility

Navigate to the Lookahead tab.
Ensure you have "fetched" activities from the Master Schedule.
Look at the Gantt chart. Each activity will display two bars: the editable Colorful Bar and the Light Gray Shadow Bar underneath it.

Interpret the Variance

Observe the alignment between the two bars:

Aligned: The field team is working exactly according to the master schedule.
Colorful Bar is to the Right: The field plan is slipping (starting or finishing later than the master schedule).
Colorful Bar is to the Left: The field team is ahead of schedule (finishing earlier than the master schedule).
Extended Bar: If the colorful bar is longer than the shadow bar, the task duration in the field is taking longer than originally estimated.

Analyze Deadline Variance (Optional)

If you have set hard deadlines on your activities:

Locate the Deadline Variance column in the grid.
A positive number indicates the number of days the current finish date has slipped past the locked deadline.
Use the Filter icon on this column to show values "Greater than 0" to quickly see all late tasks.