Recalculate project timelines

Last update: June 25, 2025

CREATED FOR:

  • User

Recalculating Timelines allows managers to see how different factors related to the project are impacting the project’s timeline. A project’s timeline refers to planned and projected dates.

Making changes to schedules, personnel time off, and other items outside the scope of a project do not impact the project timeline immediately. The project timeline is impacted when the timeline is recalculated. External influences do not take effect on your project until the recalculation occurs.

This article describes the ways in which timeline recalculation happens.

Automatic timeline recalculation happens without special access for any of the users involved in working on the project. In addition, you can manually recalculate the timeline.

Access requirements

Expand to view access requirements for the functionality in this article.
Adobe Workfront planAny
Adobe Workfront license

New: Standard

Or

Current: Plan

Access level configurations

Edit access to Projects

System administrator to recalculate timeline for all projects in the system

Object permissionsManage permissions to a project

For more detail about the information in this table, see Access requirements in Workfront documentation.

Automatic recalculation

By default, project timelines are automatically recalculated daily when the project scope changes or every night. The Workfront administrator determines whether to automatically calculate timelines every night or with every scope change by managing the Timelines settings in the Project Preferences area of Setup. For more information, see Configure timeline recalculations for projects.

NOTE
If the timeline of a project is longer than 15 years, the automatic recalculation is disabled for that project and you can only select a Manual update type. If you change the dates on the project to less than 15 years, you must manually recalculate your timeline one time before it is calculated automatically.
IMPORTANT
For the Preview and Custom Refresh Sandbox environments, the nightly recalculation is disabled and the project timelines aren’t recalculated automatically. You must manually recalculate the project timeline for the Preview and the Custom Refresh Sandbox environments.

Automatic recalculation of project timelines

Workfront recalculates timelines daily only for projects where all of the following conditions are met:

  • Have a Current status.

  • Project update type is set to Automatic or Automatic and On Change.

    For information, see Project Update Type overview.

  • Have a Last Update Date within the past 3 months. A Workfront administrator can change this default functionality. For more information, see Configure timeline recalculations for projects.

  • Last calculation date of the project timeline isn’t within the current calendar day. This means that the last calculation date of the project timeline is before 00:00 of the current day.

You can configure how frequently the timeline for your project is updated. When the project timeline is updated, it’s recalculated based on changes made to the project.

For information, see Select the project Update Type.

Actions that trigger an automatic recalculation of project timelines

Various scope changes in the life of a project automatically recalculate the project timeline, including the following actions:

  • Updating task status.
  • Moving a task to a different project.
  • Updating the Planned Date or Planned Completion Dates of the tasks.
  • Updating the Duration Type, Task Constraint, or the number of assignees on the tasks.
  • Updating task predecessor relationships.
  • Adding an approval to a task that also adds time to the Planned Completion Date of the task.
    For more information about approval settings, see Configure global approval settings.

Manual recalculation

As a project owner, you can manually recalculate the timelines for individual projects. The Workfront administrator can manually recalculate all timelines in Workfront.

Recalculate timelines for individual projects or in bulk

You can recalculate the timeline of a project in Workfront from the project page or from a project list or report.

  1. Go to the project you want to recalculate the timeline for and click the More icon More menu to the left of the project name.

    Or

    Go to a project list or report and select one or several projects, then click the More icon More menu at the top of the list.

    TIP
    Depending on the complexity of your projects, we recommend not selecting a large number of projects when recalculating their timelines in bulk to ensure optimum performance. Some things that could make a project too complex might be multiple dependencies or assignments, or a large number of custom fields.

  2. Click  Recalculate Timeline. The timeline recalculates and a success message displays on the screen.

    TIP
    Before the timeline recalculation is finished, some planned or projected dates might display as dimmed. This means that the recalculation is not yet finished, and the dates are subject to change.

Manually recalculate timelines in bulk in the Edit Projects box

You can manually recalculate the timelines of several projects by editing them in bulk.

TIP
Depending on the complexity of your projects, we recommend not selecting a large number of projects when editing them in bulk to ensure optimum performance. Some things that could make a project too complex might be multiple dependencies or assignments, or a large number of custom fields.

  1. Go to a list of projects.

  2. Select several projects in the list, then click Edit.

  3. Click Settings, then select Recalculate Timelines.

  4. Click Save Changes.

Recalculate timelines for all projects in the system (Workfront administrators only)

Workfront administrators can run the Recalculate Timeline diagnostic to immediately recalculate all timelines in the Workfront system. This allows all Project Managers to see the influence of external changes immediately on both planned and projected dates.

For more information about recalculating timelines for the entire Workfront site, see the section Recalculate timelines for the entire Workfront instance in Configure timeline recalculations for projects.

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