Statements of work
- Purpose
- Break a project's budget into named lines, with whatever amounts, rates and dates your organisation tracks.
- Who is this for
- Project and program managers
- Prerequisites
- At least one project.
- Permissions
- Access to the project and to its budget lines. Admins add the financial fields.
A statement of work (SOW) is one line of a project's budget: a named item such as a phase, deliverable, work order or cost code. A project can have many. Break the project's budget down inside Gembaa instead of in a spreadsheet.
Your workspace may call these something else, such as Work Orders or Cost Lines. An admin can rename them in Terminology, and the name then changes everywhere. This page uses the default name, SOW.
How it works
Every SOW belongs to exactly one project. It cannot exist without one, and you cannot clear the project from an existing line.
A new workspace gives a SOW only five fields:
| Field | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Name | What the line is for. Required. |
| Project | The project it belongs to. Required. |
| Status | Where the line stands. |
| Description | Any detail. |
| UUID | A system identifier. Hidden by default. |
There are no money fields to start with. Gembaa does not assume how you account for work: a fixed price, time and materials and an internal cost line all look different. An admin adds the fields you need, such as Amount as a currency field, Quantity, Unit rate, Start date, End date or Cost code. See Entities and custom fields.
See project SOWs
- Open the project.
- Select the SOWs tab.
The tab lists that project's lines in a small table. Search the list, sort it, choose columns with Customise, and double-click a cell to edit it. A project with no lines shows "No SOWs yet".
If you can see the project but not its budget, the tab tells you that you do not have access to it.
Add a SOW
- Open the project.
- Select the SOWs tab.
- Click Add SOW. The Project is filled in and cannot be changed.
- Enter a Name.
- Optional: fill in the other fields.
- Click Add. The line appears in the tab.
You can also add a line from the SOWs page in the left menu. There you choose the Project yourself, because a line cannot be saved without one.
Browse all SOWs
The SOWs page in the left menu lists every line across the projects you can reach. It has the same tools as any module: tabs, filters, sorting, grouping, a board by Status, import and export. See Filter, sort and group and Customise your table view.
Currency fields show as an amount such as $1,234.50 and are edited as a plain number. An empty amount shows a dash, not $0.00.
Group SOWs
The SOWs page is the only table that can group its rows. Grouping is not available in a board.
- Open Customise on the SOWs page.
- Choose a field in Group by. Only fields that hold one value per row are listed. Choose None to ungroup.
- Close the panel. The list shows one header row per value.
Each header shows the value, the number of lines in the group and a subtotal for each column that has a total in the footer. Click a header to collapse or expand its group. Lines with an empty value fall under (No value), which is always last.
Edit, duplicate or delete
Click a line to open it in its panel, which shows all its fields in one list. Click a field to edit it. Use a row's menu for Edit, Duplicate or Delete. The menu is Row actions on the SOWs page and SOW actions in a project's SOWs tab. Delete asks you to confirm.
Good to know
- Deleting a project deletes its SOW lines. The confirmation tells you how many records will go with it, including SOWs.
- SOWs do not appear on the Gantt, because they have no dates until an admin adds some.
- A SOW's comments take their access from its project, through the project's Comments on SOWs permission, not from a permission on the SOW itself. Open a SOW and click the Comments icon to start a thread. See Comment on a record.
- Budget access is granted separately from access to the project itself. An admin sets who can see and edit budget lines. See Access control.
- In a new tab the read-only ID column, the record key such as the prefix and number, comes first. A tab made before it existed hides it; turn it on in Customise. Name cannot be hidden.