With Placeholders, you can add users without access to Productive to Scheduling. This means that you can schedule people that are not yet a part of your organization, or you just want to plan ahead and see if you should look for new teammates.
Assign a name and a cost rate with the capacity to a Placeholder, so you can see how their assignments will impact your budgets. Edit and manage them accordingly.
Add Placeholder
To add Placeholders, go to Settings > Scheduling. Click on + Add new placeholder
First, make sure you give the Placeholder a name. Then set the planned salary i.e. the cost rate and working hours (capacity). You can also add custom fields from the custom field library. When you set everything up click Create placeholder button.
The indicator at the bottom will show you how many scheduling Placeholders you used and have left in your pricing plan (for example 2/5).
Now, let's see how Placeholders will look in Scheduling:
To take it a bit further, you can use Placeholders in Insights as well, for example in Capacity & Availability Insight.
Edit and manage Placeholder
To edit a Placeholder, simply go to Settings > Scheduling, and click on the Placeholder you wish to edit.
Or, when in Scheduling there is an option to Manage placeholders. Find it to the very right, on the Settings button. This will again take you to Settings.
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.
Custom Fields
Because a Placeholder acts as an actual person in Productive, you can also assign custom fields to it, as you do with regular teammates. To add a custom field to a person, normally you would go to Contacts > People and add it there, but for Placeholders, the procedure is a bit different.
To add a custom field to a Placeholder, go to Settings > Scheduling and add click on the Placeholder in question:
Under the Placeholder name, you'll see a list of custom fields you can assign to it:
To assign a custom field, just select one from the dropdown.
In Scheduling, by clicking on a three vertical dots icon next to the placeholder, you can make changes to placeholders, such as reassigning all bookings to another user or placeholder (Reassign all bookings to), duplicate and edit placeholder. Edit placeholder opens the same pop-out editing window from Settings > Scheduling.
Add Placeholder to a project
After you set up a Placeholder, you can assign it to a project by clicking on the button + Add booking.
Then you choose the project and the service you wish to book this Placeholder against. After you entered all the data, click on the Create booking button.
Note: If you wish to add a Placeholder to a project, you can only do that from the Scheduling module, and not from the Project module. Also, tasks cannot be assigned to Placeholders.