Staffing view: plan who works on what, and when

Beebole’s Staffing view is a long-horizon timeline of who works on what, and when. It is one of the four views of the Planning page, alongside the Gantt chart, the Kanban board, and the List view — the bars you see are the same tasks, displayed per person instead of per task. Use it to book people onto projects, set how much of their time each booking takes, and see at a glance who still has capacity.

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Opening a Staffing view

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Reading the timeline

Each row is a person (or a project, depending on the grouping). Each bar is a booking: a task scheduled between two dates, shown in the task’s color. The bar displays the task name — and, when there is room, its date range and the secondary project path.

• A vertical line marks today; the Today button scrolls back to it.
• The timeline extends into the past as well as the future — keep scrolling left to review earlier plans.
• Bar edges snap to working days, so bookings line up with what people can actually work.

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Bookings with hours

A task that carries start and end times is drawn at its real position inside the day column rather than filling the whole day, so a booking from 14:00 to 17:00 sits in the afternoon third of its cell. The stretches the owner does not work — before their day starts, their scheduled breaks, and after their day ends — are hatched behind the bar, which makes a booking placed outside working hours obvious at a glance. Bookings that run past midnight start late in one day’s cell and end early in the next. Dropping a booking onto a day its owner doesn’t work is refused rather than silently accepted. Days that define a length but no working hours show the booked hours in proportion, with any overrun hatched.

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Grouping rows

Open the ⋯ menu on the view tab and use Staffing by to choose what the rows represent:

• People — One row per person, with their bookings and a capacity strip.
• A project category — Pick a category, then a level or Lowest level; one row per project at that choice, showing everyone booked on it.

Lowest level keeps only the projects that have nothing below them, so you never see a parent row duplicating the work of its children. When a level you picked shows a project that still has sub-projects, its row stands out in the accent color with the note Not at the lowest level: move its bookings to one of its sub-projects — bookings belong on the projects at the bottom of the hierarchy, where time is logged. With a project grouping, an owned booking that has no row to sit on — the task is linked to no project of that category, or only to a parent — falls into the row at the top of the view, labeled No followed by the grouping name.

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Creating a booking

A booking doesn’t need a task name — the fastest way to staff someone is to book them on a project for a date range. Beebole names the booking automatically from the person and the project. The new bar appears immediately. If your active filters would hide it, Beebole tells you: Booking added, but it’s hidden by the current filter.

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Tentative bookings

While plans are still firming up, mark a booking Tentative in its editor. A tentative booking is drawn with a hatched style and reserves the person’s capacity, but stays out of reports until confirmed.

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Splitting and duplicating

From the booking’s editor you can also Split it in two at a chosen date — useful when part of a booking moves — or Duplicate it.

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Moving and resizing bookings

• Move — Drag a bar left or right to shift its dates. The bar moves by whole days — or by whole weeks when the timeline is set to Infinite by week — so it keeps its exact length and the weekday it starts on instead of snapping to the grid; other bookings restack live as you drag.
• Resize — Drag the left or right edge to change the start or end date.
• Move between rows — Drag a bar vertically: drop it on another person’s row to reassign the booking, on another project’s row to move it to that project, or on the Unassigned row to clear its owner. A dashed ghost previews where the bar will land, and the whole move is one undo step. The booking’s working time reflows over the destination person’s own schedule and absences.
• Work on several bookings at once — Select multiple bars and drag them together to reschedule the group in one move, hold ⌘ (Alt on Windows/Linux) while dragging to drop dated copies, or grab any selected bar’s edge to shift every selected bar’s dates by the same amount — all undoable as a single step. ⌘-dragged copies land on the row you release them on, each on its own row rather than stacked on the row you dropped on. Press Delete (or Backspace) to remove every selected booking at once: one confirmation, and one undo for the whole batch.
• Reach beyond the visible range — Drag a bar to the edge of the timeline and it auto-scrolls, so a booking can be moved or extended past what is currently on screen.
• Reassign — Click a bar to open its editor and change the person, the project, or the allocation. Both the person and the project can be changed on any booking, whether the rows are people or projects. Changes are saved automatically.

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Moving a booking inside its day

A booking that runs for part of a single day is dragged on the clock its cell draws. While the pointer stays in that cell the booking follows it hour by hour, snapping to the quarter hour, as on the timesheet calendar — and it lands on hours the owner works, reaching over a lunch break rather than sitting on it. The moment the pointer leaves the cell, the booking moves by whole days instead, keeping the hours it already had, so it never arrives on another day at hours nobody chose. ⌘-dragging a copy and dropping it in the cell it came from puts the copy right after its source: the first free minute of that day, holding as much of the day as the source holds. When there is no room left after it — an all-day booking, one spanning several days, or a day already full — the copy simply lands on its source, as it does elsewhere on the timeline.

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Dependencies in the Staffing view

Dependency links between bookings are drawn directly on the staffing timeline, color-matched to the tasks at each end, so you can see which bookings depend on which. Moving or resizing a booking cascades to its linked bookings live — dependent bars follow the drag on screen before you drop. If a linked task that moves isn’t visible in your current view, a warning names it so you know what changed and can undo it. See Task dependencies for how links are created.

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Bookings managed in the Gantt

A task that has subtasks has a schedule the Staffing view must not change: its dates come from its subtasks. When you try to edit one, Beebole shows Managed in the Gantt with the message “This task has subtasks, so its schedule is managed in the Gantt.” Open the Gantt chart to adjust these tasks.

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The Unassigned row

Planned work nobody has picked up yet sits in the Unassigned row. Drag a booking onto it to clear the owner, or drag one out of it onto a person to assign the work. The row can be collapsed out of the way — its tooltip reads Show these bookings or Hide these bookings — and ⌘-dragging an unassigned booking drops the copy straight onto the row you release it on. Click the pin icon on the row to keep it under the timeline header while you scroll — its tooltip reads Keep this row under the header — so its bars stay within reach when the person you want to drop them on sits further down the list. Click it again (Stop keeping this row under the header) to let the row scroll with the others. Like the collapsed state, the pin is remembered per view. You can also draw a booking straight on the row. Nothing is saved until you pick the person or the task it is for, so an editor you open and then abandon leaves no stray booking behind — the same as on any other row. The number next to the row label counts the unassigned bookings that fall inside the period you are looking at, not every unassigned booking on record — so it tells you how much work still needs an owner right now. An account-wide reminder can warn everyone involved before an unassigned task starts — see Timesheet and Planning Settings.

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Locking the view to a period

By default the timeline is infinite — it scrolls by day or week as far as you need. Open the ⋯ menu on the view tab and use Period to lock the view to a fixed window instead:

• Infinite by day or Infinite by week — the endless scrolling timeline, at day or week granularity.
• Day, Week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 4 weeks, or 6 weeks — the chart fits that window to your screen and shows only the bookings that fall inside it.

With a fixed window, the view pages one period at a time: swipe or scroll sideways and it snaps cleanly onto the next or previous window, and the period containing today is always reachable. Bookings that start before or end after the locked period are drawn cut off, with a dashed edge and a chevron — click it to jump to the hidden start or end date. Cut edges can’t be resized, since the date they would move isn’t on screen.

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Copying the previous period

With the view locked to a fixed period, Copy the previous period refills the current period from the one before it — with or without the people and project assignments. Choose With people or Without people, and With projects or Without projects, to decide how much of the booking is carried over. Beebole looks back to the last period that actually holds bookings, not just the one immediately before, and fills every empty period between it and the one you are looking at — so a run of unstaffed weeks is refilled in a single action. Anything that would spill outside the period is clipped. If there is nothing to copy, Beebole says so: No earlier bookings to copy.

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Finding who’s free

Click Find capacity to search for available people over a chosen period — including forward-looking ranges like By year end and Next 12 months: A count shows how many people match. You can also filter the people list by person custom-field values, and search people and projects by name. Capacity is only computed when grouping by people.

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Workload and capacity

Each person’s row includes a capacity strip: one cell per period comparing their planned load to their available capacity. Capacity comes from the person’s work schedule minus their absences, and each booking counts for its allocation percentage.

• Hover a cell to see the numbers — how much is planned against how much is available for that period.
• Overload — Load bars use a three-color scale: red while capacity remains, green when it is exactly met, and purple as soon as someone is booked beyond 100%. The headcount strip in the timeline header flags overloaded periods for the whole view.
• Step through the load — The strip at the top of the timeline header rolls every row up into one bar per period. Click a period there to step the scroll through the rows driving that period’s load, one at a time.
• Hours or days — Open the ⋯ menu on the view tab and use Durations in to switch every figure between hours and days.

Use the free capacity to decide who takes the next booking — the gaps in the timeline are exactly the people and periods still available.

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Filtering

Use the Filters button to narrow the view — by task, status, owner, assigned person, project, or tags on people, projects, and tasks, with the active filter count shown on the button. Filters on people or projects hide entire rows; other filters hide only the bars that don’t match, keeping the row visible. The filters can be switched off and back on without losing them — the button toggles them rather than clearing them.

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Keyboard navigation

The Staffing view has a keyboard cursor that moves from bar to bar, so you can review and open bookings without the mouse:

• Arrow Down / Arrow Up — Move to the closest bar in the lane below or above within the same row, then on to the next or previous row. Rows without bookings, and the Unassigned row while it is collapsed, are skipped.
• Arrow Right / Arrow Left — Move to the next or previous bar in the same lane; when the lane has none, to the nearest bar that lies entirely after (or before) the current one in any lane of the row.
• Enter — Open the task panel for the bar under the cursor; press it again on the same bar to close it. While the panel is open, it follows the cursor as you move.
• Shift+Arrow — Select the bars in the lane between the cursor and the bar you land on, like Shift+Click.
• ⌘+Arrow (Ctrl on Windows and Linux) — Add the bar you land on to the selection, or remove it, like ⌘+Click.

With no bar selected yet, the first arrow key lands on the first row’s bar closest to today, and the timeline scrolls to keep the cursor in sight. A selection built with the keyboard behaves like any other: drag it, ⌘-drag it, or press Delete to act on every selected booking at once. The Gantt and List views add tree keys for expanding, collapsing, and indenting tasks — see Keyboard navigation in the Gantt chart.

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Related content

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Frequently asked questions