Project Hours Actual / Hours Projected

Connections Online saves manual and rolled-up task hours separately, letting teams compare them over time for planning vs. actual tracking. Here’s how to decide which method works best for your use case:

Use Manual Entry When:

• You’re in the early stages of project planning and just need high-level estimates.
• Your team doesn’t track day-to-day progress in Connections, but you still need to log hours for reporting or accountability.
• You want to input time quickly. For example, summing totals from another system or spreadsheet.
• You’re estimating resource needs before assigning tasks or finalizing scope.

Example:
A marketing team uses Connections to align with other departments but tracks progress in another tool. They enter 40 projected hours for a campaign manually so stakeholders can see capacity and status, even if they aren’t updating every task in Connections.

Use Task Rollup When:

• Your team actively updates tasks within Connections, logging time as work progresses.
• You need accurate actuals for performance tracking, retrospectives, or utilization reporting.
• You want hours to automatically roll up for cleaner project totals, without manual recalculation.

Example:
A product team manages sprints in Connections and logs hours on each task. Their actuals roll up automatically so leadership can see accurate totals in dashboards. No double-entry required.
 

Manually Enter Hours at Each Level

Project Level by editing the project itself and setting the projected hours and actual hours. This sets the overall estimate for the project. 

Tasks and milestones by editing them directly to update the hours actual and hours projected values

Important: These values will display as entered with no rollup to the project level, as the project level hours projected and hours actual have been set manually.

Task-Level Rollup

Team members enter their projected and actual hours on the tasks they’re assigned.

Additional hours that aren’t tied to specific tasks can be entered on the team member’s row in the Project Team tab.

These hours will roll up to calculate overall totals for each team member and hours for the entire project. 

What Happens If Manual and Rolled-Up Hours Are Both Used?

Connections Online retains both manually entered and rolled-up hours, but when both are present, the system prioritizes the rolled-up task-level values across all key views. This means the actual work logged by team members will be reflected wherever hours are displayed:

• Project page header
• Project list view
• Project task page header
• Project task list view