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.
📌 Note: 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 the article on Navigating Projects: Tabs and Layout Options.
📌 Note: You can add multiple Resource Planning tabs to your project, each with its own different fields, time range, and visibility options.
📌 Important: 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, any existing bookings tied to services that belong to the budgets or sales deals tied to the project will be displayed for each person.
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.
Select the person you want to book on this project.
The new person’s Resourcing Panel will appear at the bottom of the page. This panel will also show budgets and services from other projects.
This helps you compare their available capacity with existing bookings.
You can then add new bookings for that person.
Once a new booking is added for an employee through the Resourcing Panel, the booking will also appear at the top half of the page.
The bottom overview can then be closed either by pressing the escape key or by pressing X in the right corner.
Creating Bookings for Multiple People at Once
You can also create identical bookings for several people in one go. In the upper-right corner of the booking window, click the Select multiple assignees icon. Once enabled, it will turn violet.
A new Assignees input field will appear, allowing you to select multiple people for the same booking setup.
📌 Note: You can use this method to add bookings even if one of the assignees had no previous bookings related to this project.
