# What Resource Planning is, and what it deliberately does not do

**Category:** [Resource Planning](https://help.totalctrl.app/hc/totalctrl/totalctrl-help-center/en-US/categories/resource-planning)
**Updated:** 2026-08-19

## What it is

**Resource Planning** answers the two questions a delivery business asks every week: who is booked on what, and who has room. It plans in **weeks** — allocations are hours per week, capacity is per week, and the schedule is a grid of weeks.

The pages are **Schedule** (the grid), **Utilization**, **Find someone**, **My schedule** and **Capacity & settings**.

## A plan is not a timesheet

An allocation is an *intention*. A time entry is a *fact*. They are deliberately kept apart — different app, different tables — and shown side by side, so the gap between what you planned and what actually happened stays visible instead of one quietly becoming the other.

Logged hours are read from Time Tracking rather than copied here. There is one record of an hour worked, and it is the one your invoices come from. Two copies would drift.

## Nothing here blocks time entry

Over-allocation is a **warning**, never a refusal. Somebody booked at 45 hours in a 40-hour week gets a flagged cell on the grid, and everybody carries on working.

This is a design decision, not an omission. A plan going stale is not the timekeeper's fault, and refusing their hours would not repair the plan — it would only mean the hours never get recorded, which costs you the invoice as well as the plan.

## Weeks, not months — and a day view where it matters

A month hides exactly the problem this app exists to show: 160 hours across a month looks comfortable until 60 of them land in one week. Weeks are the planning unit for that reason.

Days still matter for one person at a time, which is what the **person** view is for — it is where a day or a half day off is entered and seen.

## It works without the Employee Directory

Capacity, working patterns and time off all live in Resource Planning, so the app is useful on its own. Skills are the one thing it borrows: with the Employee Directory installed, **Find someone** can filter by skill; without it, the filter is simply not offered, rather than being offered and silently matching nobody.

## No cost, no margin, no AI

Resource Planning never shows what anybody costs. Rates and margin live in Time Tracking's profitability pages, behind their own fence.

And every number here is arithmetic over your own rows. No model is asked to judge anything, so opening these pages costs no AI Units however often you do it.

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## Related Articles

- [Availability and utilization: which number you are actually looking at](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/resource-planning-utilization)
- [Capacity, working patterns and time off](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/resource-planning-capacity-and-leave)
- [Who can see and change what, including contractors](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/resource-planning-access)
- [Resource Planning from the API or an agent](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/resource-planning-api)
- [Allocations: hours a week, soft bookings and overlaps](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/resource-planning-allocations)

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