Plan your resources once your budget is set up as your baseline

Updated 27th December 2024

Click on the tour below to get an overview of how you can plan your resources once you've set up your budget as a baseline. To get a detailed understanding please take a look at the rest of the article below.

To learn how to set up a project's resource planning without a budget, refer to the article Plan your resources without a project budget.

To help with the management of project resources, PSOhub offers the Budget Grid functionality, allowing detailed budgets to be created based on hours, roles and resources. With the Budget Grid, roles and resources can be allocated against specific contract lines and budgeted hours or amounts can be set for each contract line, providing a comprehensive overview of project profitability.

For more information on utilizing this feature, please refer to the article Create a detailed budget based on hours, roles and resources.

Once a budget has been set, it can then be used as the basis for how resources are planned for the project. To do this, click on the Update button and check the option Update resource planning.

Once the resource planning for the project has been updated based on the project's budget, you will see that information in the contract's view: Planned vs Used Hours.

You can now begin planning these hours. They will in turn feed this view and allow you to see your baseline (Budget) and planned hours as the project unfolds. Click Resource Planning.

In the Resource Planning module of your project, you will see the lines generated by your budgeted hours under each contract line.

For each contract line you will find the columns To be planned, Available and Total hours, which will be automatically updated as you start planning the budgeted hours.

Understanding how the information is displayed:

When planning hours for a role where no resource has been assigned, the Schedule button will appear under the Available column.

This allows any planned hours for a role to be assigned to a specific resource who meets the role criteria. To find an appropriate resource, click on the Schedule button. This will open the Schedule Role Overview:

This overview will list all resources who have the role and it will assign a Match % figure based on their current availability.

To access the Monthly View, click on the Month button in the top-left corner of the Resource Planning view:

In this view, the calendar year is broken down by months, from January to December. To navigate to a past or future year, use the left or right arrow buttons.

In the fields below each respective month, you can plan the number of hours you expect the resource or role to execute the budgeted hours. To easily navigate from one month to another, use the Tab key on your keyboard.

Important: As hours are entered on the Monthly View, these hours will be evenly split across all weeks of the month and all days of the month. It's a good idea to check both the Weekly and Daily Views once you have entered hours on the Monthly View.

Important: to remove a value in the grid, you must enter a 0 in the field, to override the previous value. Pressing the backspace or Delete will not remove the current value.

To access the Weekly View, click on the Week button in the top-left corner of the Resource Planning view.

Alternatively, you can click on any of the 12 months to open the Weekly View on the selected month.

In the Weekly View, the month selected is broken down into weeks. To navigate to a past or future month, use the left and right arrow buttons.

Note: For some months there may be weeks which overlap with other months. Such weeks will appear in the Weekly View for both months. For example, Week 22 includes dates from both May and June, so will be included under both May and June.

Important: As hours are entered on the Weekly View, these will be evenly split across all days of the week and will also contribute to the planned hours for the month. It's a good idea to check both the Daily and Monthly Views once hours have been entered on the Weekly View.

Important: to remove a value in the grid, you must enter a 0 in the field, to override the previous value. Pressing the backspace or Delete will not remove the current value.

To access the Daily View, click on the Day button in the top-left corner of the Resource Planning view:

Alternatively, you can click on any of the weeks for a particular month to open the Daily View on the selected week.

In the Daily View, the selected week is broken down into individual working days from Monday to Friday. To navigate to a past or future week, use the left and right arrow buttons.

Important: When planning hours on the Daily View, note that the total hours planned will contribute to both the planned hours for the week and the planned hours for the month. It's a good idea to check both the Weekly and Monthly Views once hours have been planned on the Daily View.

Important: to remove a value in the grid, you must enter a 0 in the field, to override the previous value. Pressing the backspace or Delete will not remove the current value.

At the bottom of each contract line in the Planned view, you'll find the total number of planned hours, along with the associated Amount for each month (based on the selling rate for the resource or role).

At the very bottom of the Resource Planning view are the grand totals of planned hours and billable amounts.

Once you start booking hours towards a project, you can use the Actuals view on Resource Planning to compare booked hours with planned hours.

To do this, click on Actuals in the top-left corner of the Resource Planning view.

Instead of showing planned hours, actual hours that have been booked against the project will be displayed for easy comparison.

Below each contract line will be a Planned vs Used grand total. In situations where the number of planned hours has been exceeded, the actual hours will show in red.

To compare amounts instead of hours, click on the Amount button in the top-left.

This will display the actual amounts in your company currency.

As with the actual hours, where the planned amount has been exceeded, the actual amount will show in red.

When you've finished planning your project's resources, you can navigate back to the project by clicking on the orange back arrow, or alternatively click on the project name in the top-left corner.

Back in your project, change the view of your project from Contract to Planned vs Used hours, you will see the planned hours displayed next to the budgeted hours.