Beta Release: Set up a project and baseline from a Statement of Work

Setting up a new project has always been slow. Sometimes you're starting from scratch; sometimes there's a commercial agreement already in place, captured in a Statement of Work (SoW). When the SoW exists, setting up the project in Forecast meant reading it, then retyping what was already there by hand: the client and dates, the deliverables, the hours committed against each role, the fee. Tedious, repetitive work, and it's where the first errors tend to creep into a project's data.

Now Baseline Builder does the first pass for you. Upload the SoW and it sets up the project, then turns the commercial detail in the document into a baseline: the deliverables and the hours committed against each role, in place as your starting estimate. You review it, edit anything you want, and confirm. Nothing is created until you do.

Forecast drafts, you confirm. It reads what your SoW actually says and lays it out in Forecast structure, and it never invents numbers to fill the gaps.

• Set up the project from the SoW. Project name, client, start and end dates, budget type, and fee are read from the document and pre-filled for you to check.

• Build the baseline from the SoW's commercial detail. Where the SoW lists deliverables, they are extracted into the baseline, with descriptions where the document provides them.

• Get committed hours into the baseline. Where the SoW states hours, per deliverable or per role, they flow through as your starting estimate.

• Review and edit everything before anything is created. You see the full draft first. Change a name, fix a date, adjust hours, remove a deliverable, then commit. This is a preview, not a done deal.

• Optionally create placeholders in one step. A single toggle generates resource placeholders from the baseline at the same time, exactly as it would from the baseline screen today.

• Keep an audit trail. What's persisted is a JSON audit transcript — sow_filename (just the name string) plus the extracted metadata/deliverables/roles/Q&A. The actual SoW document is not attached to the project.

1. Start a new project and choose to set it up from a SoW. The existing manual setup path stays exactly where it is.

2. Upload the SoW. Forecast reads it, sets up the project, and populates a baseline.

3. If anything is ambiguous, say a client name that doesn't quite match your records, a rate with no rate card selected, or a date written as "Q3", Forecast asks a short, specific question. Every question has a Skip, and skipping flags the field for you to fill in later.

4. Review the project and baseline, edit as needed, and confirm. The project, its baseline, and any placeholders you opted into are created together.

Being useful here means being honest about what a SoW contains and what it doesn't. Forecast won't guess.

• It never invents hours. If your SoW is silent on hours for a deliverable or role, that line stays empty in the baseline for you to fill. No fabricated estimates.

• It tells you when a document doesn't fit. Retainers and framework agreements (MSAs) don't describe a single scoped project, so Forecast won't force one out of them. It says so and points you to manual setup rather than producing something wrong.

• It doesn't create tasks. Task-level breakdown stays with you, after kickoff, where the detail actually lives.

• It doesn't assign people. Placeholders only, never specific team members.