When working with recurring budgets, Resource Planner bookings can behave differently depending on when and how they’re created.
Understanding these behaviors will help you ensure that hours are assigned to the correct budget period and that your forecasting data remains accurate.
This article covers the three main booking scenarios you might encounter when working with recurring budgets, along with tips for keeping your workload and profitability data consistent.
1) Bookings created before triggering the next occurrence (recommended)
If you’ve already created bookings on the current budget and then trigger the next occurrence (either automatically or manually), Productive will automatically reassign each booking to the correct new budget based on the dates.
Example: You create repeating bookings in March (tied to the March budget) and then trigger the April, May, and June budgets—each future booking will be moved to its corresponding monthly budget.
2) Bookings created after triggering the next occurrence
If you create a booking after generating future budgets and repeat it, the repeated bookings will remain linked to the original service and budget.
Example: You trigger budgets for April–June, then create a booking in the Resource Planner and repeat it for three months. All those bookings will stay on the April budget unless you manually adjust them or trigger another budget occurrence.
📌 Important: Bookings don’t automatically reassign to the next available budget or service unless a new budget occurrence is triggered after they’re created.
3) One long booking, split automatically across multiple budgets
If you create a single booking that spans multiple months, for example, one continuous assignment from April through September, and then trigger the next 6 recurring budgets, Productive will automatically split that booking and assign each portion to the correct monthly budget.
Example: You create a single 6-month booking for a designer on the April budget. After triggering the next 6 budget occurrences, the booking will be split and reassigned—April’s portion stays on the April budget, May’s on the May budget, and so on through September.
Booking impact on forecasts
If all your bookings are assigned to a single budget (because of timing or setup), Productive will attribute all those hours to that one budget in your forecasted profitability charts.
This can skew planning data and make it harder to evaluate workload across recurring periods.
📌 Tip: Follow the booking scenarios above to ensure hours are evenly distributed across recurring budgets.