% task complete v's ACTUAL WORK DONE

Hi Inderpal

Thank you for your question.

When the schedule of a task is unchanged, and the task is complete then marking 100% duration complete or putting in the actual start and finish dates lead to the same result.

When you record Actual start and Finish dates you don't need to manually adjust the schedule by changing the planned start and finish dates. Project will look after that for you.

As you will have noticed updating the planned start date / finish dates is likely to prompt Project to add constraints to your task.

If you use the Actual dates Project positions the tasks and records progress immediately so it doesn't need to add constraints to position them correctly.

Also if your task is not following the schedule then recording Actual and Remaining duration redraws the task without triggering the Task Type calculation that would occur if you for example manually changed the duration value.

I hope this makes sense - let me know if you have any further questions.

Kind regards,
Andrew