Schedule and bookings

Schedule answers a question the timesheet cannot: not what did we do, but what have we already promised, and who has room for more. It sits at /schedule and is open to managers, admins and owners — seeing everybody's workload is a management view rather than a personal one.

Reading the schedule is part of the base product. Creating bookings requires the Schedule add-on, enabled under Settings → Add-ons. The split is deliberate: knowing your current position costs nothing because the data already exists, while planning forward is the paid half.

The three sections

Capacity — each person's booked hours against the capacity they actually have for the window.

Planned vs tracked — per project, the hours booked against the hours logged, with the variance in hours and as a percentage. This is the comparison a standalone scheduling tool structurally cannot make: it plans against estimates, while your tracked hours are in the same database.

Bookings — the individual commitments, with the controls to add and remove them.

What counts as capacity

Capacity excludes everything the person will not be working:

• Weekends.
• Approved time off, shown separately as leave hours. Schedule reads only the dates — never the leave type or the reason — so an absence never reveals that somebody was off sick.
• Public holidays, from the calendar assigned to that person under Time off → Setup. Two offices on two calendars each get their own, so a UK bank holiday does not mark a New York colleague as unavailable. If your workspace has exactly one holiday calendar it applies to everybody; with several, a person observes only the one their leave assignment names.

This is the same calculation the Team page uses for utilization, so the two pages agree about what a person's week was worth. See capacity and utilization.

Part-time people

Schedule works out a part-time pattern from two values you have already set: Capacity (hours per week) on the person's Team page, and Hours per day on their leave assignment. Somebody contracted for 20 hours a week with an 8-hour working day works two and a half days.

Both halves matter. Without the day length, 20 hours a week gets spread across five days as four-hour days, and booking that person for a normal working day looks like a 200% overload. With it set, their booked day reads as a full day and their weekly total is measured against the 20 hours they are contracted for. People on a part week are labelled Part-time in the capacity list.

One limit worth knowing: Time Trakkr records how many days a week somebody works, but not which days. Their weekly total is therefore exact, while day-by-day availability assumes any weekday could be one of their working days.

Making a booking

Pick a project, a person, a date range and hours per day.

Tentative or confirmed. A tentative booking is pipeline — work you are discussing but have not committed to. It appears in the bookings list but is deliberately excluded from capacity, so a shortlist of maybes cannot make somebody look fully booked.

Placeholder bookings. Leave the person as Placeholder (nobody yet) and pick a role instead — work you know is coming before you know who will do it. A placeholder needs a role: it is the whole point, because the role is what the demand is for.

Roles are managed under Team → Assignments, and the same roles are what you assign to people. That link is what makes the next section work.

Unassigned work: the hire you need

When placeholder bookings exist, an Unassigned work section appears, listing per role:

• needed — hours booked against that role with nobody assigned;
• spare — unbooked hours across the people who hold that role;
• short — demand the current team cannot absorb.

A shortfall is the useful number. "We are overcommitted" is a feeling; "you are 40 hours short of a Developer in April" is a hiring decision, or a reason to decline the work. Nothing else in Time Trakkr can say it, because it needs planned demand and current spare capacity in the same place.

Two details worth knowing:

• Only people who hold the role count as supply. Somebody with no role set contributes to nobody's spare capacity — otherwise every shortfall would dissolve into a pool that cannot actually do the work.
• Only confirmed placeholders count. Tentative work is pipeline; counting it would have you hiring for a project you have not won.

The section is hidden when no placeholder work exists, rather than showing a table of zeroes — which would read as "nothing needed" when it really means nobody has planned anything.

Overbooking

A day is flagged as overbooked when confirmed bookings exceed what the person has available that day, after leave. Booking somebody during approved leave is the clash most worth catching, because it looks perfectly reasonable on a timeline.

Reading planned vs tracked

Positive variance means more was worked than planned. Where nothing was scheduled, the percentage is shown as blank rather than as infinity — work tracked against nothing planned is an interesting case in its own right and deserves a real answer rather than a divide-by-zero.

Asking the assistant

The assistant can report planned work for a date range — who is booked to which project and for how long — for managers and admins. It does not create bookings: a booking is a commitment of somebody else's time, and that belongs in the app where the capacity picture is in front of you.