Scheduling is a tool that enables you to do high-level time allocations for your entire team. 

Why is scheduling important?

You can’t be efficient without a good scheduling workflow. How do you know who’s going to work on what project and for how long? What if someone gets sick and you need to assign the project to someone else? Who’s available? Who’s going to be available in 4 days, 4 weeks, 4 months?

Scheduling answers all of these questions for you, and the important things about it are:

First of all, you need to have the Coordinator, Manager or Admin role to manage Scheduling.

Go to the Time section and switch to the Scheduling tab. Here you’ll have a list of all your employees and contractors.

Simply click on the square where you want the schedule to start and drag the line into the future for as long as you want.

You don’t have to be precise about the exact dates. You can always tweak the start and end date in the pop-out dialog. To save the booking, you’ll need to fill out two things: the project you're scheduling someone for, and a specific service on that project.

You can also select how would you like to allocate that person's time. You can select:

Hours per day means that the person's time will be distributed according to the value you've entered: e.g., a teammate has been scheduled to work on this project for two hours each day.

If you use percentages, that means that the person will be scheduled for the project relative to their total capacity. E.g., if they work eight hours a day and are scheduled to work 50%, they will be scheduled for 4 hours for that project.

Total hours will allocate their time to the project, but not per day: e.g. if you schedule someone to work 10 hours during five days, it does not matter how many of those 10 hours will be used during one day.

If your project and budget don’t have any services yet - don’t worry. Productive automatically creates a new placeholder service called Open hours on any newly created budgets. This way you’ll always have something to schedule against.

To change something in the schedule, click on the booking and select an action you need from the menu.

Note though that you will not be able to change the allocation type from this menu (e.g. from h/day -> total hours). If you wish to do so, you will need to delete this booking and create a new one with the correct allocation type.

Events are company-defined off-times. It’s usually a vacation, sick leave, maternity/paternity leave, sabbatical, unpaid leave, etc.

It’s important to include those in your schedule so you have 100% accurate availability information. For example, you schedule someone’s vacation 3 months in advance. Chances are you’ll forget about it in the next couple of weeks. But, you won’t be able to schedule this person on a project in that period because the slot is taken.

You’ll need to create all the events you want to track in the schedule. Go to your Time and resource management settings and find Time Off.

Scroll down to events and click + Add time off category.

An event can either be paid (sick leave, vacation…) or unpaid (sabbatical, unpaid leave…). By “paid” here we mean - does the company pay the person for that time off.

Put down everything that’s relevant to your company’s schedule on that list. Paid events automatically get “time tracked” so that all your cost reports are correct.

Time tracking becomes much simpler and easier to use:

Check out this article to learn more about Adding Time Off.

You can switch between several scheduling views:

You can also Zoom out if you want to have a clearer overview. 

Click on Settings to the very right to:

Default indicators will give you a more detailed overview:

... and you can zoom in to show how much time is allocated per day:

If the project is private the Staff role will not see the details of that project - it will only show the name of the project, allocated hours, and a project manager.

The same goes for Time offs, it will only show Absence and allocated time, but not the Time off category.

If you have filters applied to your view, bookings that are outside of the filtered values will appear as grayed out.

For example, by applying a filter that would only show bookings on internal projects, all bookings on client projects and time-off bookings will be grayed out and bookings for internal projects will be highlighted:

When clicking on Manage placeholders the navigation takes you to Settings > Scheduling placeholders.

Here you can add a new Placeholder or edit the existing one. There is an option to change the color scheme of the Placeholder, rename it, change the cost rate or the working hours (capacity) and edit custom fields.