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Scheduling hacks

Updated

Resource Bookings is where you plan and schedule work across your team. A few settings and habits make it much faster to use day to day, especially if you're booking time in and out constantly.

This article covers how to set your preferences, choose a calendar layout, and book time in directly from estimates or work requests. Treat the first two as a one-off setup, then use the booking tips whenever you're scheduling.

Setting your preferences

Your preferences control what the Resource Bookings screen shows you every time you open it. It's worth setting these up once, properly, rather than working around a default view that doesn't suit you.

  1. Select the preferences icon in the top half of the calendar.
  2. Choose which teams you want to schedule or view.
  3. Choose whether the loading view shows available hours or remaining hours.
  4. Turn on task date indicators if you want red arrows shown when something is booked in before or after the phase dates.
  5. Set the colour, description and size of the columns displayed, and choose whether duration shows first.
Note: Available hours and remaining hours are not the same thing. Available hours shows capacity left before any bookings are made. Remaining hours shows what's left once existing bookings are taken into account.

Choosing your calendar layout

The layout controls how much of the schedule you see at once, and how far back or forward you can look.

  1. Choose to view by day, week or month.
  2. Use the calendar icon to jump to a date in the past or future.
  3. Set the number of weeks you can scroll through.
  4. Switch between booking view and loading view depending on whether you want to see individual bookings or overall capacity.
Tip: Loading view is the quicker way to spot who has spare capacity. Switch to booking view once you've found the person you want to book time against.

Booking from estimates or work requests

  1. Move the toggle in the lower half of the screen between Estimates and Work Requests.
  2. Drag and drop the estimate or work request onto the calendar to create a booking.
  3. Select Work Request Actioned or the tick icon against a work request to hide it from the list once it's booked in.
  4. Open any briefing templates attached to a work request to help make an informed booking.
  5. Add a note against a booking if there's anything the person you're booking needs to know. Notes are visible to whoever the time is booked against.
Note: Who is responsible for booking from estimates versus work requests can vary by company. Check your own process before assuming this sits with you.

Speeding up bookings

Once your preferences and layout are set, most of the time saving comes from working with existing bookings rather than recreating them. Right-clicking a booking gives you options to edit, duplicate, create a recurring booking, or filter the calendar down to a single client, job or phase. Find out more about using the right-click menu on resource bookings.

If you've filtered the calendar down to one client, job or phase, the filter actions button lets you act on everything in that filter at once. This covers moving a run of bookings by a number of weeks, confirming or reverting multiple draft bookings, and deleting future bookings if a job isn't going ahead. See using the filter actions menu for the full breakdown.

Use Add events in the top right at any time to book in holiday or other out of office events.

Tips

  • Set your preferences once, properly, rather than adjusting the view every time you log in.
  • Use loading view to find spare capacity, then switch to booking view to make the booking.
  • Book from work requests where you can. It keeps briefing information attached to the booking, so nothing gets lost.
  • Add a note to a booking whenever the person doing the work needs context. It saves a separate email or message.
  • If a job slips or falls through, use filter actions to move or delete a run of bookings in one go instead of editing them individually.

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