New Construction: Analyses & Comparison

A construction project rarely has one future — different budgets, different loans, different absorption. In DealWorthIt's construction workspace each of those futures is an Analysis: a complete, independent set of assumptions with its own saved calculation. (Other asset types call these Scenarios; construction calls them Analyses.)

What an Analysis is

Every project starts with one analysis, created with the project itself. Each analysis owns its assumptions and its results outright — editing or recalculating one never touches another. The analysis strip at the top of the Overview, Underwrite and Reports tabs is where you switch between them, rename them (the pencil), or delete them (the trash — the last analysis on a deal can't be deleted, and a deleted analysis's saved calculations are retained for audit rather than shown).

Creating one — blank or from an existing analysis

New Analysis opens one dialog for both starts:

• Blank Analysis (the default) — a clean slate. Nothing is preselected on purpose, so cloning is always an explicit choice.
• Start from an existing analysis — copies its assumptions and its current saved result, verbatim. The banner afterwards is precise about this: the results you see were copied, not recalculated. Change any assumption and use Calculate & Save to produce this analysis's own result.

Creating an analysis switches you to it. How many analyses one deal can hold is set by the deal owner's plan — when the deal is at its ceiling, the New Analysis button stays where it is with a padlock and shows what changing plan would unlock (or "Analysis limit reached" when there's nothing to offer). Deleting an analysis frees a slot immediately.

Two kinds of saving

The workspace deliberately splits "saved" in two, and the footer status bar always tells you which state you're in:

• Inputs save as you go. Assumptions you type are stored as a draft — on leaving a field, immediately for selects and toggles, with a short backstop for fast typing. A draft only decides what the form shows when you come back; it never changes a result.
• Results exist only after Calculate & Save. The engine runs on the server and stores an immutable saved calculation. Until then the footer reads "Inputs saved · Nothing calculated yet" — and after you edit a calculated analysis it counts the changes not yet reflected in the saved result. Revert changes discards everything back to the last saved calculation.

Compare Analyses

With two or more analyses on the project, Compare Analyses puts them side by side — from two up to four at a time, all from the same project:

• Every figure is copied from that analysis's last saved calculation — the comparison computes nothing and never recalculates. An analysis that hasn't been calculated shows as exactly that, and a metric the engine didn't publish stays absent rather than reading as zero.
• Rows run from total development cost through the capital stack to stabilization, value and returns; the best value per row is highlighted using each metric's preferred direction — an emphasis, not a score.
• Export CSV takes the table with you.

Side-by-side comparison is a plan capability of the deal owner's subscription; when the plan doesn't include it, the Compare button locks with a note saying which plan carries it.

Common questions

• "My cloned analysis shows results I never ran." — By design: a clone carries the source's saved result so the comparison starts meaningful. It's copied, not recalculated — the banner under the strip says exactly that until you Calculate & Save.
• "I deleted an analysis by mistake." — Its saved calculations are retained for audit but no longer shown, and there's no undelete. The confirm dialog names the analysis for exactly this reason.
• "The comparison shows an empty cell." — That analysis's saved calculation didn't publish the metric (for example, no exit means no IRR). Empty is the honest answer.