Set up your team for accurate resource planning

Before you can plan anything accurately, you need to know what each person does and what they're good at. Assigning roles gives every team member a function in the system so you can filter, assign, and report by discipline rather than hunting through a list of names.

• Create role types that reflect your team's functions (e.g. Designer, Developer, PM).

• Assign a role to every team member (unassigned people are invisible to role-based filters).

• Keep role names consistent across your account to ensure accurate reporting.

Capacity calculations are only as accurate as the hours you feed in. Setting working hours per person means the system knows how much time someone actually has, so when you see "available," it means genuinely available.

• Open each user's profile and go to the Essentials tab.

• Set their daily working hours to reflect their actual schedule.

• Adjust for part-time team members or those in different time zones.

Vacations, training days, and recurring meetings all eat into project time. Capturing them upfront means your capacity view reflects what's truly available, not just what's on paper, so you stop over-committing people by accident.

• Add public holidays and recurring leave in Settings → Time off.

• Use unavailable time blocks for regular commitments that reduce project hours (recurring meetings, admin, training).

• Encourage team members to keep their own unavailable time up to date.

Adding skills means planning stops being about whoever is free and starts being about whoever is best suited. This is what makes the difference between a reactive assignment and a smart one.

• Tag people with their specialties (e.g. Motion Graphics, React, UX Research).

• Keep skills distinct from roles — roles describe the function, skills describe the capability.

• Add skills progressively as you learn what types of matching matter most to your team.

Organizing into teams turns your people view into a planning layer so you can filter work by delivery unit and compare capacity across groups. Utilization targets give you a benchmark so you can see at a glance whether someone is on track, overloaded, or underused.

• Group people into delivery units under People → Teams.

• Set individual utilization targets in People settings to reflect expected productivity.

• Use teams as a filter across the Scheduler, Workload Planner, and Utilization Report.

Rates connect your planning to your profitability. Once they're in, every allocation and logged hour carries a cost and revenue value, so you can answer questions like "can we afford to staff this?" before committing.

• Add a cost rate and billable rate for each team member under People → Rates.

• Set rates before running any project work — it's hard to backfill financial data accurately.

• Review and update rates whenever compensation or billing terms change.