You can now set individual resource availability and custom rates for every team member in your company.
Resource Availability
Companies often require their team to work different hours. There are many examples of where you would want to use an individual resource time allocation such as working with freelancers to having part-time employees only committing to a percentage of work each week. The resource availability feature within Hub Planner lets you set up your company to be dynamic and allow for different work roles.
Setting a Resource Availability
This is easy and can be done directly by editing a resource in the system. You choose the Availability tab on the left hand side of the resource modal pop up and choose either to have the default company availability or use a custom availability. The availability can be set in hours each day you want to make that resource available to work. Once you set a custom availability on a resource, that time will be marked in the bookings grid to give you a visual identifier that the resource in question is available part-time on a particular day.
Setting Company Availability
Company availability has also been updated and extended to allow you to choose the days which your company works and the specific hours per day your office is open. This is useful for those companies who might close early on a Friday for example or some days are different to others. We have also explicitly introduced a lunch hour range which you can set and optionally include or exclude per day. THis update gives you complete control of how you set up your day-to-day hourly schedules.
How Resource Availability Works
There are now three (3) different types of availability you can set in Hub Planner:
- Project Availability (set days)
- Resource Availability
- Company Wide Availability
They are ranked by Hub Planner in that order. This means that your project availability defined user set days is what we look at first. If you have decided to create a custom project days then only hours booked on those days will be reported. Similar to Resource availability. e.g. If your company is set up to work Monday – Friday, but you have set a particular resource to only have availability to work on the weekend (Sat, Sun) then the company availability will be ignored for that resource and the resource availability used instead. We rank the availability like this in order to avoid conflicts and give you the maximum flexibility to plan and schedule your resources with our software tool.
Resource Billing Rates
Similar to availability you can now set individual resource rates for each employee in your team. This is very useful if you have different rates within your team of employees and contractors.
Setting a Resource Rate
This is done via the resource settings. You can click “billing rate” and from there you can decide to use the company billing rate or create a custom billing rate for the resource.
Project Budget Report
A new report has been introduced to the report section to get an overview of all project budgets. From here you can see a list of all of the budgets recorded to date in a project, the budget types and how much budget you have remaining per project.
How Rates Work?
There are a few different rates you can set within your resource planning software. They are:
- Resource Billing Rate
- Project Rate
- Company Default Rate
Hub Planner will look at the rates in this order. e.g. If you have set an individual resource rate, then we will use that rate in order to calculate how much budget has been consumed.
Bonus Feature Survey
We are running a very quick feedback survey on Hub Planner which if you decide to complete unlocks a cool bonus feature at the end of the survey. The survey can be completed inline in the tool and will help us build a better tool, so give it a go if you have 60 seconds free!!
That’s it folks…Enjoy for now…lots of new stuff coming soon including a brand new report builder…Watch this space!
Hub Planner Release Team
