Intro to Planning

Most of the app is about getting work done. Planning is about seeing what that work was worth.

It answers the questions that are awkward to answer any other way. Which customers are the biggest part of my month? Is one person carrying more of the load than the others? Which service am I actually selling most of? You could dig that out of invoices a line at a time. Planning just shows you.

What Planning is, and what it is not

Planning is a view. It reads your charges and groups them. It never creates, edits or deletes anything, so you can click around it freely without worrying about what you might change.

It shows charges — the billable items behind your reports, your manual entries and your vendor bills. A charge appears in Planning whether or not it has been invoiced yet.

It also shows what is on your invoices: subscription fees, credits, and any line you added or changed on the invoice. So once a month is invoiced, Planning’s total for it matches your invoices.

The three tabs

Tab	Groups your charges by	Useful for
Customer Planning	The property the charge belongs to	Where your revenue comes from
Assignee Planning	The person whose report produced the charge	How work is spread across your team
Item Planning	The price-list item on the charge	Which services you sell most of

Each tab works the same way, so learning one teaches you all three.

Drilling down

Planning has three levels, and you move through them by clicking.

1. The totals. One bar per customer, per assignee or per item, biggest first. This is the shape of your period at a glance.
2. The months. Click a bar and it opens into the months that make it up. The months always add up to the bar you came from.
3. The charges. Click a month and you get the individual charges — date, description, amount, and whether each one has been invoiced.

At the third level, a charge that came from a report can be opened directly, so you can go from “this number looks wrong” to the visit that caused it in two clicks.

Use Back to come up a level. The page keeps your place in the address bar, so you can bookmark a view or send someone a link to exactly what you are looking at.

Choosing the period

The Period control sets the window every tab uses:

• This Month and Last Month
• This Year — the whole calendar year
• This YTD — 1 January to today
• Last Year

Changing the period keeps you on the tab you are on.

Two buckets that catch the leftovers

Real data is untidy, so Planning has a home for charges that do not fit neatly.

Unassigned holds charges with nobody attached — a manual charge you typed in yourself, a subscription fee, a line you added on the invoice, or a report whose assignee was cleared. It is a real row: click it and drill it like any other.

(no item) holds charges with no price-list item on them. Manual charges often land here, because you can enter an amount without choosing an item.

Neither is an error. They are where to look when a total is higher than the named rows explain.

Why vendor bills are missing from Assignee Planning

A vendor bill is money you owe a contractor, not work one of your people did. Including it in Assignee Planning would credit a person for a plumber’s invoice, so Assignee Planning leaves vendor bills out entirely.

They are still in Customer Planning and Item Planning, because the customer was still charged and the item was still sold. If the Assignee total for a period looks low next to the Customer total, vendor bills are usually the difference.

Who can see Planning

Planning shows money, so it follows the same rule as the rest of the billing surfaces: you need editor access to the company, and you need to be allowed to see rates. Anyone whose account hides rates will not see Planning in the menu at all.

The Price tab goes further — it is Admin only, because it changes what you charge in the future rather than reporting what you charged in the past. That tab has its own article.