Trades in the construction schedule
The trade states which contractor carries out a task: mason, carpenter, plumber, painter. In the schedule it sits next to the task label and answers the question of who is on site when that bar begins.
What the trade contributes to the plan
- It makes responsibility readable without a name having to appear in the plan.
- It allows related tasks to be grouped and reviewed together.
- It connects the schedule to tendering and accounting through a shared label.
- It shows, when looking at a single week, how many trades are on site at once.
Label before number
In practice the trade is often equated with a number from the cost classification. For scheduling that is the weaker choice: on site people ask for the trade, not for a digit. A speaking label reads immediately – including for participants who do not carry the cost system in their heads.
This does not rule out the number. Anyone keeping their own coding can store it and carry it through the plan. The difference lies in which order leads: the sequence of works, not the cost centre.
Two orders that coexist
A bar chart sorted by cost groups reads like a budget and no longer shows the sequence. Two tasks of the same trade may lie months apart; two tasks in the same week often come from entirely different trades. The structure of the schedule therefore follows the course of the works – the trade remains the attribution, not the sort order.
In Menira
The trade column is available in every project and takes free text – from a short trade name to your own coding. It appears in the plan and in the print-ready PDF, and can be hidden where it is not needed.