Resource scheduling for agencies

The problem

A staffing plan in a spreadsheet is easy to write to and hard to read. One tab per person, a column per week, a cell that says “Loyalty 50%”. Nothing in it adds up on its own, so the two questions that matter most, who is over and who is free, need a person to scroll sideways and sum cells in their head. By the time the answer is wrong, the week has started.

The second problem is granularity. Whole days are too coarse for a developer who spends the morning on one client and the afternoon on another, and a sheet that tracks hours per person per day per project is a sheet nobody updates.

How it works in PepperPlanner

The Schedule is a timeline: people down the side, days across the top, a coloured bar for every allocation. An allocation is a project, a date range and hours per day. Click an empty cell to add one, drag a bar to move it, pull its edge to extend it, or split it where a person switches projects mid-week.

Every row shows allocated hours against available hours for the visible period. Available is the person’s daily hours times working days, minus vacation and public holidays. Allocated is the sum of their bars. When allocated passes available, the number turns red. That one rule replaces the mental arithmetic of the spreadsheet.

Hours per day are the unit. A backend developer can have 6 hours on a migration and 2 hours on a presale estimate in the same week; the bars stack and the total still adds up. A project manager can simply have 4 hours on each of two projects, every day, for three months.

Vacation is an allocation too, with no project. It takes hours out of capacity, so a week off never looks like a free week, and anything planned on top of it shows up as a conflict. Public holidays are set once per workspace and apply to everyone.

The people and projects behind the bars are plain lists, not a setup project. A person has a name, a position, daily hours and, if you want cost and revenue in reports, a cost rate and a billable rate. A project has a client, a stage (presale, confirmed, active, paused, closed, or your own) and a budget. Positions and clients can be created from inside the form you are already in, so adding a new hire or a new client is one step, not three.

Switch to “By project” and the same data regroups: each project with its people and their hours per day, plus the total hours and planned cost for the period. That is the view a project manager opens before a client call. Week and month zoom, sorting by name or by availability, and collapsed weekends are remembered per device.

Everything here is the plan, not timesheets. PepperPlanner does not track hours worked; it tells you what is booked and what is free. We use Jira for tasks and the Schedule for people, and we stopped trying to make one tool do both.