What Is an Actual Date in Scheduling? Definition and Example

An actual date is the real time an operation started or finished on the shop floor, recorded against the plan, and it is the difference between a schedule on paper and a schedule that reflects what actually happened. An actual start date is when the operator recorded the step as begun; an actual end date is when it was recorded as finished. The concept is the same as a payroll punch: the plan says the shift is 8 to 4, but the clock records that you swiped in at 8:05 and out at 4:20. Those recorded times are the actual dates.

This entry is part of the EDGEBIC by User Solutions glossary series; for the broader vocabulary of production planning, see the manufacturing glossary.

How Actual Dates Work

Every scheduled operation carries planned dates that the engine computes, and slots for actual dates that the floor fills in. The planned dates are a moving target: every reschedule recomputes them. The actual dates are recorded once, from reality, and they behave very differently.

The actual start date says work has begun. Once it is set, the operation is in progress, and a reschedule will not replan it from scratch; instead the engine carries the remaining hours forward from the resume point.

The actual end date says work is finished, and it does something stronger. Once an operation has an actual end date, the rescheduler treats it as immutable: it will not move the operation, recompute its dates, or reallocate its hours. That single rule is what makes a reschedule safe on a job that is already partway through production. Finished steps are pinned by their actual end dates, and only the unstarted and in-progress steps get replanned.

Actual dates also feed variance. The original planned dates are kept from the very first scheduling run and never overwritten, so the plant can always compare what was promised to what was recorded.

A Concrete Example

A three-step job is planned as cut Monday 8:00 to 14:00, drill Monday 14:00 to Tuesday 10:00, paint Tuesday 10:00 to 16:00. By Monday afternoon the floor has logged:

When the planner reschedules, the engine reads those actual dates. Cut and drill both have actual end dates, so they are frozen exactly as recorded. Paint has no actual dates, so the engine replans it from Tuesday 11:00, the moment the last finished step actually ended, and finds Paint-1's first available slot. Cut started 30 minutes late and drill ran an hour long, and the schedule now reflects both, because it read the actual dates instead of pretending the plan held.

How EDGEBIC Uses It

In EDGEBIC actual dates are recorded from the Log Actuals dialog, from Gantt drag actions, or from the shop floor kiosk, and they drive every reschedule.

• Actual end dates lock completed work. A finished operation is immutable to the engine, which is the foundation of actuals preservation on reschedule.
• Inverted pairs are blocked. An actual end at or before the actual start is rejected on every write path, and marking a same-day job complete snaps the actual end to the end of that day so a short close does not invert.
• In-progress steps keep their actual start. A step with an actual start but no actual end is rescheduled by its remaining hours only, and the actual end is left null so the next run re-classifies it correctly.
• Original dates survive for variance. The dates from the first run are never overwritten, so plan-versus-actual comparison always has a stable baseline.

Actual dates are recorded at the day level in the daily hour breakdown, which pairs planned and actual hours per day. The actuals tracking explained walkthrough shows how a punch becomes an actual date, and what is production scheduling sets actuals in the wider loop.