Tentative bookings, also known as soft allocations, allow you to plan resources for projects that have not yet been confirmed.
This feature in Productive’s Resource planner helps manage potential workloads without affecting the total scheduled hours until the booking is confirmed.
Creating And Confirming Tentative Bookings
To create a tentative booking, head over to the Resource planner, create a new booking, and select Tentative from the booking pop-up.
You will notice that tentative bookings are marked with grey stripes and they are not added to the person's total scheduled hours.
Tentative bookings will also affect how capacity indicators are displayed.
If there is a confirmed and tentative booking for the same date, the capacity indicator will only take the confirmed booking into the calculation.
If only a tentative booking is assigned for the day, capacity indicators will turn grey.
Once converted into a Confirmed booking, hours from that booking will be added to that day's total scheduled hours.
To confirm a booking, click on a tentative booking and select Confirm.
This change will also be displayed in the Booking history.
Tentative Bookings in Reports
Bookings Data Source
In the bookings data source report, the Status field will show whether a booking is Confirmed or Tentative.
You can also set a filter to only display confirmed or tentative bookings.
Capacity And Availability Data Source
Tentative fields are available in the capacity and availability data source report which will display time, cost and revenue for tentative bookings.
Financial Items Data Source
Tentative bookings can be accessed through the Type field, and can also through filters. Additionally, they behave like any other type in this data source, e.g. showing revenue, cost, and similar information (based on a filter set).
Access to Tentative Bookings in the Resource Planner
All Employee users can see tentative bookings except those with Staff, Staff with CRM access, Staff with time access permissions, and Staff with Time and CRM permissions.
Note that those with Staff with time access permissions, and Staff with Time and CRM permissions can view basic confirmed booking information, including the client company, booking duration, time allocation, and the project manager.