When creating a new booking from either the People or Projects perspective in the Resource planner, the main decisions to make are selecting:
1) the person you are creating the booking for
2) the service
3) the booking's duration
4) the time allocation
On top of that, Productive provides additional options for improving your resource planning. We'll look at these in two stages:
Options available during booking creation
Options that appear post-saving the booking
Note that after saving the booking, all of the options mentioned will be available!
Options Available While Adding a New Booking:
While adding a booking, in addition to specifying the person and service names, as well as the date range, consider the following:
Time allocation
Confirmed and Tentative bookings
Notes
Automatically tracking time for a booking
Scheduled and View Full report options
Options Available After Saving the Booking:
Once your booking is saved, you'll have access to additional options to further manage it:
Duplicate the booking
Delete the booking
Additional options like splitting or repeating the booking, opening the budget, and converting the booking between tentative or confirmed.
Check out each of these options below.
The availability of features such as Tentative bookings and Automatic time tracking varies depending on the subscription plan.
1) Time allocation in a booking
When creating a booking, choose how you would like to allocate the person's time. Options include Hours per day, Percentage, and Total hours.
Hours per day means the person's time will be distributed according to the entered value. For example, a teammate can be scheduled for two hours each day on a project or a deal budget/service.
Using percentages means the person is scheduled relative to their total capacity. For example, if a teammate has an 8-hour workday defined in their cost rate and is scheduled for 50%, they will be allocated 4 hours a day for that project.
Total hours allocate a person's time to the project without specifying the daily work breakdown. For example, if you schedule someone for 10 hours over five days, the distribution across those days doesn't matter. However, Productive will evenly spread these hours, resulting in 2 hours per day for 5 days in this case.
2) Confirmed and Tentative bookings
Choose between Confirmed or Tentative when making a booking.
Tentative bookings provide a way to reserve a person's time for a specific project without confirming their availability definitively.
Moreover, tentative bookings allow you to create bookings without affecting the person's capacity and availability, but they can still be used to analyse the potential revenue and cost of working on a service.
3) Notes
Add a note while adding the booking for easier analysis as you progress. The note will be accessible in your Bookings data source report, for instance.
4) Automatically track time for a booking
Automatic time tracking logs your team's work hours based on their bookings, making time management easier and reducing manual time tracking.
5) Scheduled and View Full report options
Scheduled Time
By checking the "Scheduled" section when you open a booking, you'll see a calculation detailing the time allocated to the service.
For instance, in the example below, we estimated needing 100 hours for the "Workshop Preparation" service and we've currently booked 12 hours in total for this service.
It's important to note that this calculation does not take into account previously worked or logged time, focusing solely on bookings from the Resorce planner.
View Full report
For a more comprehensive analysis of the scheduled time, click on "View Full report" to access detailed insights into the entire budget and its associated services.
Note that the report is only accessible if you have the necessary permissions to view it. While most users will see it, there may be certain permission combinations where you won't see the "View full report" option.
This report provides the following breakdown:
Estimated Time (to complete): Your estimated duration for completing the service's work.
Scheduled Time: The total time booked for the service.
Left to Schedule: A calculation indicating the remaining available time for scheduling (Estimated time to complete - Scheduled time).
Worked Time: Hours logged for the service.
Future Scheduled Time: Time booked for future dates, including "today"..
Managing the Booking after Saving
After saving a booking, you can always click on it to adjust the allocated time, service, note, or the time period; just remember to hit "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.
Duplicate the booking
This creates a copy of the booking for the same person on the same day. Use this option if you need to make minor adjustments to the booking later on.
Delete the booking
Selecting "Delete" removes the booking from the Resource planner and completely removes the allocated time.
Additional options
Access the additional booking options through the three-dot menu to:
Split the booking (if longer than one day), creating two bookings for easier booking management.
When splitting a booking, consider where you clicked on it in the Resource planner. So, if you want to divide it in half, click somewhere in the middle of the booking!
Open the budget the service belongs to in a new tab.
Convert the booking to tentative or confirmed.
Repeat the booking: You can repeat your booking on a weekly or monthly basis and decide for how long.
When deleting a repeating booking, you'll have the option to delete the selected booking alone, the selected booking and any other future bookings associated, and all bookings in the series (past, present, and future).
