The Resource Planning tab helps you manage team capacity within specific projects, giving a clear overview of existing bookings and available time for each team member.

You can quickly add new bookings and absences, track service assignments, and ensure your project resources are used efficiently.

📌 Bookings in the Resource Planning tab apply to services that belong to the budgets or sales deals tied to the project. If services haven’t been added to a deal or budget, you won’t be able to see or create bookings. Make sure the deal or budget has all necessary services assigned.

Adding a Resource Planning Tab

To add a Resource Planning tab:

Click Show all tabs at the end of your current navigation bar.
Select + New tab.
Choose Resource Planning

👉 For more information on how to add and customize visible tabs in your project, see Navigating Projects: Tabs and Layout Options.

📌 You can add multiple Resource Planning tabs to your project, each with its own different fields, time range, and visibility options.

📌 Even if Project Managers pin the Resource Planning tab, staff users without access will not see it. Visibility of sensitive elements is still dictated by your permission set, just like in other parts of Productive.

Navigating the Resource Planner

The Search Bar allows you to find specific team members quickly.

Filters allow you to narrow down the displayed information based on specific criteria, such as viewing bookings for a particular budget, absence category, or status.

Adjust zoom levels to quickly switch the view between Week, Month, Quarter, Half-year, Year, and Custom date range.

You can also navigate left and right through time:

Use the arrow buttons above the calendar to move day-by-day or week-by-week.
Or use your keyboard arrows for quicker navigation.

Explore additional functionalities by navigating to the rightmost gear (⚙️) icon:

Week numbers: Display week numbers to keep track of planning periods more easily.
Stack bookings: Organize overlapping bookings vertically within the same row, creating a more compact and readable view.
Show all holidays: View holidays from all assigned calendars across your organization—not just the user’s own—so you can plan around non-working days more effectively.
Capacity indicators: Use heatmaps to visualize availability. Red signals overbooked users, while green indicates balanced workloads. Options include:
- Hide indicators: Turns off heatmap visuals entirely.
- Include tentative: Choose whether tentative bookings are factored into capacity calculations.
- Show hours: Displays the total number of hours a person is booked across all budgets per day.
- Extended: Shows detailed capacity indicators without hour values.
- Compact: Displays minimal heatmap shading without hour values.
Density: Adjust column width to suit your planning style. Use narrow columns to fit more time on screen or widen them for better visibility of shorter bookings.
Color bookings to make your schedule easier to read:
- No color – Removes all color highlights
- Project colors – Color bookings according to the set project color
- Budget colors – Color bookings according to their related budget
Manage placeholders: Add, remove, or reassign placeholders to plan upcoming work before assigning real people.

Managing Bookings

When you open the Resource Planning tab, it lists all project members plus anyone booked on services tied to the project's budgets or sales deals, even if they aren't a project member.

Members without a booking appear as empty rows, so you can see their availability and add a booking directly.

You can see each person’s capacity and how much of it is already filled. This includes bookings on other projects as well.

For each project-related booking, you can see the service it is assigned to and the name of the budget the service is linked to.

Adding a New Booking

To add a new booking, click + Booking:

📌 Note: If there are no existing bookings on the project, the Resource Planner will be empty. Click + People to add and create your first booking

Choose the service you want to book time for. You can also choose to book an absence for that person. Absence bookings behave the same as they do in the Resource Planner (by Person).

👉 To see a more detailed explanation of all available options for creating new bookings, see the article Booking Details Explained.

Once a new booking is added, it will immediately appear in the Resource Planner.

Adding New People

To add a new person, click + (Add People) next to the search bar. This opens a dropdown listing people who aren't already shown as a row.

Selecting a person immediately adds them to the project as a Project Member, and their row appears below right away. The dropdown stays open, so you can add several people one after another.

📌 If you don't have permission to add people to the project, the + button won't appear. The rest of the view stays visible either way.

You can also add a placeholder to the project this way, so it appears as a row before anyone is actually booked.

Creating Bookings for Multiple People at Once

You can create identical bookings for several people in one go. This option is only available in the expanded modal: click the ↗ icon to switch from compact if needed.

In the expanded modal, the Assignees field supports multiple people. Select everyone who should receive the same booking setup and click Create booking to confirm.

📌 Adding multiple booking assignees is available on the Ultimate plan only.