Add jobs and recurring work
A job is one piece of work you have taken on. What you put in its fields is exactly what reaches your capacity figure, so it is worth knowing which fields do what.
The fields that change your figure
| Field | Effect |
|---|---|
| Name | Required. Never public. |
| Due date | This is what makes the job count. Without one it is a draft and contributes nothing. |
| Base amount | Your estimate of the work, in your work unit. |
| Variables | Named amounts added to the base. See below - this is the one most often misread. |
| Tentative | Halves the contribution, and excludes it from your Beacon entirely. |
| Progress | Decays the contribution to what is left. |
A start date is optional and must not be after the due date. It is used by the week-by-week view rather than by the headline figure.
Variables are added, not multiplied
This catches people, so it is worth stating plainly. A variable is a named amount that is added to the base amount, in the same unit.
- A variable of 1.5 on a 10-hour job makes it 11.5 hours.
- The value that has no effect is 0. Not 1. A variable parked at 1 quietly adds an hour to every job it is on.
- A negative value subtracts.
You can define variables once in Work setup so they are offered on every job, or add a one-off name inline on a single one. Variable names and values never appear on any public surface - your Beacon carries only the aggregate percentage.
Tentative work and part-finished work
Tentative is for work you have discussed but not confirmed. Marking a job tentative halves what it contributes to your own view - and removes it from every published figure outright. There is no setting that lets tentative work reach a client.
Progress is how much of it is done. A job reported 40% done contributes 60% of its amount. You can move it back down as freely as up; nothing locks.
The two compose: a tentative job reported 40% done contributes 30% of its total to your own view, and nothing at all to your Beacon.
Finishing and deleting
Marking a job done takes it out of the calculation. If you had been reporting progress on it, the app records what you actually spent at that point, which is what later estimate suggestions are built from.
Deleting is a soft delete. The row stops appearing everywhere and stops counting, but it is not shredded - which matters when you delete something by accident, and matters again when you delete your account, where the removal is permanent.
Work that repeats
A recurring job is a rule - weekly or monthly - that creates ordinary jobs on a schedule. What it creates is indistinguishable from something you typed by hand: the capacity engine, your Beacon and your lists treat them identically.
Three things are worth knowing about how it behaves:
- It only materialises inside your planning horizon. A weekly rule with a four-week horizon creates about four jobs ahead of you, not a year of them. They appear as the window moves forward.
- Monthly rules clamp to short months. A rule anchored on the 31st falls on the 30th in April and the 28th or 29th in February.
- An occurrence you edit is yours from then on. Editing one instance marks it as changed, and it is never rewritten or swept away by a later edit to the series.
Editing the series replaces future untouched occurrences and leaves past, finished and edited ones alone. Deleting the series removes future untouched occurrences and unlinks the rest, which become ordinary standalone jobs rather than disappearing.
If you call them something else
Candid Beacon calls these jobs by default, and you can rename them - to “projects”, “briefs”, or anything that fits your work - in Work setup → Terminology. The change is cosmetic and account-wide: it renames the word throughout your screens, including in past activity entries, and changes nothing about the calculation.
These documentation pages are the same for everyone and cannot know your choice, so they say “job” throughout. Read your own word wherever they do.