Productive's Resource planner is a powerful tool that helps you make big-picture time allocations across your team, helping you plan your resources, book people on time off or projects, monitor their capacity, and create placeholders for future hiring and projects.
Important: Task bookings are not supported in the planner.
When using the Resource planner, you'll be booking individuals on budgets, their associated services, as well as deals to effectively plan your team's assignments and future work.
If your new project and budget don’t have any services defined yet, don’t worry!
Productive can automatically create new placeholder services called Open hours and Open expenses on newly created budgets. This way you’ll always have something to schedule against in the Resource planner.
Deals do not have projects assigned to them. However, you can still book/schedule people on different deals, as well as track time on them, just as you'd do for budgets and services.
Let's see how to book people using the Resource planner!
1) Booking Resources from the "People" Perspective
When you select "People" from the Resourcing menu, you'll see a clear list of team members or teams on the left side.
This helps you manage resources better, avoiding overworking or underutilizing anyone.
Follow the steps below to create a booking and schedule someone on a service from this perspective.
Tip: If you don't see someone you expected in the list, try adjusting the filters to refine your search!
1 | First, ensure that you have the right permissions to manage Resourcing. |
2 | Navigate to your Resourcing tab, hover over the Resource planner and select People from the dropdown. |
3 | Select the start date for the booking, then drag to set the duration. |
4 | Make sure your project has a budget assigned. If you can't find your service, check the possible reasons here. |
5 | Choose the project and the specific service for the person's booking. Alternatively, select the deal for their booking. |
6 | Select the start and end dates for the booking and choose how much time you are allocating per day or in total. |
7 | Decide between a confirmed and tentative booking, add a note if needed, and if you have any custom fields here, fill them in and then click "Create booking" to add the booking to your Resource planner. |
2) Booking Resources from the "Projects" Perspective
When you select "Projects" from the Resourcing dropdown menu, you'll see a list of distinct projects on the left side, allowing you to allocate time efficiently for each project and plan ahead.
Follow the steps below to book someone on a project budget or a sales deal from the Projects dropdown.
Tip: If you don't see a project you expected in the list, try adjusting the filters to refine your search!
1 | First, ensure that you have the right permissions to manage Resourcing. |
2 | Navigate to your Resourcing tab, hover over the Resource planner and select Projects from the dropdown. |
3 | Select the start date for the booking, then drag to set the duration. |
4 | Make sure your project or sales deal has a budget assigned. If you can't find your service, check the possible reasons here. |
5 | Choose the person and the specific service for the person's booking. Alternatively, select the deal for their booking. |
6 | Select the start and end dates for the booking and choose how much time you are allocating per day or in total. |
7 | Decide between a confirmed and tentative booking, add a note if needed, and if you have any custom fields here, fill them in and then click "Create booking" to add the booking to your Resource planner. |
3) Booking people for Time off
Manage your team's time off, including vacations, sick leave, or any other specified reasons set up as time-off categories. For further details, refer to the article on adding time-off bookings here.
Additional Booking Options
When creating a new booking from either the People or Projects perspective in the booking editor, you will encounter several important options alongside the main inputs like the person, project and service selection, date range, and allocated time, which include:
Confirmed and Tentative bookings
Notes
For more details on all booking options, check out this link!
Scheduled time and View Full report
Under "Scheduled," you will find information about the time allotted to the service in the booking, which will assist you in ensuring that adequate time has been allocated for each service in a project.
This calculation does not account for previously worked or logged time; instead, it focuses solely on resource planning, which means it compares the hours allocated in the Resource planner to the estimated time defined in the service budget.
For detailed insights into the entire budget and associated services, click "View Full Report".
Note: Access to the report depends on permissions; some users may not see this option based on their permissions.
Booking Details
After saving a booking, you can always click on it to further adjust the allocated time, service, note, or time period; just remember to select "Save changes" after editing.
Besides these, you can further adjust your booking by accessing the options in the upper-right corner of your booking popup.
For more information on all these options, check out this article.
