Maverick tasks have more than 50 fields — but eight of them do most of the scheduling work. Understanding what each field controls and how they interact lets you build more reliable plans and use AI updates more effectively.
1. Task Name
A clear, unique task name is the single most important field in the task grid. It's what you and the AI use to refer to the task in prompts, reports, and Gantt labels. Ambiguous names — "Review," "Draft," "Update" — cause confusion for humans and lead the AI to modify the wrong task. Rename any task whose purpose isn't obvious from the name alone.
2. Start Date and Finish Date
These two fields place the task on the timeline. When you change one without changing the other, Maverick recalculates the duration automatically. When dependencies are set, changing a predecessor's finish date cascades to update these fields on downstream tasks — which is why explicit dependency links are more powerful than manually-entered dates.
3. Duration
Duration is the working time between the start and finish dates, excluding non-working days from the project calendar. A task that starts Monday and finishes Friday has a duration of five days, not four. Duration-driven tasks recalculate their finish date when you change their start — making duration the cleanest way to describe effort when you know how long work takes but not exactly when it will begin.
4. Dependency Links
Dependencies define the sequence of work and turn your task list into a network. A Finish-to-Start link means the successor cannot start until the predecessor finishes. Maverick supports FS, FF, SS, and SF link types, plus lag (delay) and lead (overlap) values. Properly-linked tasks reschedule automatically when any part of the chain changes — manually-dated tasks do not.
5. Assigned Resources
The resources field ties people, machines, and materials to the task. It drives cost calculations, allocation charts, and AI-assisted conflict detection. A task with no resources assigned has no cost and no owner — it's a scheduling placeholder at best. Assign resources before asking the AI to analyze capacity or produce cost reports.
6. Task Status
Status values — Not Started, In Progress, Complete, On Hold — drive dashboard metrics and portfolio reports. When a task is marked Complete, Maverick locks its dates and excludes it from rescheduling. Keeping status current is essential for accurate AI-generated project summaries; the AI reads status to distinguish past from future work.
7. Cost Fields
Tasks carry budgeted cost, actual cost, and remaining cost fields. Budgeted cost is set during planning; actual cost accumulates as resources log hours or quantities. The variance between budget and actual is the core of earned-value reporting. AI can summarize cost position, but only if resource billing rates and actual hours are entered accurately.
8. Custom Fields
Maverick supports user-defined custom fields on tasks — text, number, date, dropdown, and checkbox types. Use them for information your organization needs that doesn't fit standard fields: contract reference numbers, approval codes, external system IDs, or risk scores. Custom fields are also visible to AI, so you can include them in prompts: "Flag all tasks where the risk score is High."