Audit a schedule

When someone hands you a schedule — a contractor's baseline, a subcontractor's submittal, a monthly update — you need to know whether to trust it before you sign off. Auditing in Owl PM combines two things: automated checks that flag structural problems, and Owl reviewing the plan the way an experienced scheduler would, in plain language.

This works on any schedule, whether Owl built it or you imported it.

Step 1 — Load the schedule you were given

Import the file. To vet a contractor's plan without mixing it into your own, import it as a Scenario or Snapshot rather than your main schedule.

Step 2 — Run the automated checks

Owl's guardrails are the first pass of any audit. They catch the structural problems reviewers look for — tasks with no predecessor or successor, work scheduled outside its allowed window, durations over a cap, phases that start before their gates. Open the guardrails summary for the one-glance verdict.

"The guardrails summary: passing, warning, and erroring checks with a pass rate."121The pass rate — a low number is your one-glance verdict that the schedule needs work before you rely on it.2The Needs attention list — errors and warnings surfaced first, so you scrutinize the weakest checks up front.

A low pass rate, or errors on the network-soundness checks, tells you the schedule needs work before you rely on it.

Ask Owl
Audit this contractor schedule. Check for missing logic, negative lag, long-duration tasks, hard constraints, and out-of-sequence work, and summarize what you find.
Is the critical path realistic, or is it driven by constraints and open-ended tasks?
List every task with no predecessor or no successor.

Owl goes beyond the fixed checks — it reads the schedule and reports what a scheduler would call out: over-constrained logic, unrealistic durations, missing hand-offs, or a critical path that doesn't make sense. You review its findings and decide what to push back on.

Tip: Ask for the audit as a checklist you can send back. Owl can produce a written review you paste into an email or a review comment, with the specific task IDs it's referring to.

Find anomalies between updates

Auditing isn't only a one-time check of a single file. The more revealing question is often what changed between last month's update and this one — the changes a summary email won't mention.

Owl keeps a full history of the schedule, so you can see exactly what moved. Open Schedule History.

"The schedule history: a timeline of snapshots, with the specific field that changed in a selected update."1231Every update is a snapshot on the timeline — auto-saved on every edit; select one to inspect it.2What changed — down to the individual field (here ADM_002's actual start date), plus who changed it and when.3Show Gantt to view the plan at this snapshot — or compare two versions and roll back.

Every update is a snapshot on the timeline. Selecting one shows what changed — down to the individual field, like a task's actual start date moving — plus who made the change and when. You can show the Gantt at any snapshot, compare two versions, or roll back.

Ask Owl
Compare this month's update to last month's and tell me what moved.
Did the critical path change between version 14 and version 17?
Flag any task whose finish date slipped more than a week since the last update.

This is how you catch the quiet anomalies — a milestone that drifted, a duration that was trimmed to hold a date, a dependency that was removed — instead of taking an updated schedule at face value.

What to do next

  • Fix what the audit found — Fix issues with your schedule walks through clearing the failures Owl surfaced.
  • Track quality over time — put the schedule-quality metrics on a custom dashboard so each update is graded automatically.