What are Placeholders?
Placeholders are used when you have a project to plan out but don't yet know who to assign to it.
By using placeholders, you can determine how much a project will cost and earn before you have sorted out your allocations.
How do placeholders work?
Placeholder rates
Placeholder assignments take their charge out rate from the role rate of the project they are on. They are the same as normal assignments.
For example, if you add a Developer to Project A and the Developer Project Rate is $150, then the placeholder will have a rate of $150 too.
Placeholder costs
You can set a custom rate for each placeholder or use the default hourly role cost. If you set a custom rate, it will override the default role cost of the placeholder. Placeholders have a cost to the project but not to the business as a whole.
Past placeholder assignments
When a placeholder assignment appears in the past (or partially in the past) the value of the past hours is changed to 0. This is under the assumption that the work was no completed as it was never transferred to a real person.
Capacity and workload with placeholders
Placeholders do not affect the capacity of your business. This is because you may hire someone external to the business to do the work or transfer it to someone already within the business. The placeholder will, however, affect the workload.
As seen in the capacity and workload chart, the placeholder assignment only affects the workload (blue bars), and the capacity is unaffected (purple background).
Full-time equivalent (FTE)
For a person, the maximum you can schedule per day is 3 FTEs, which is equivalent to 24 hours. However, for placeholders, you can map out the demand for more than one person (> 1 FTE). You can add unlimited FTEs.
Learn more about how to Plan in FTEs here.
Managing Placeholders
Adding placeholders
Go to the Project Planner
Click the Assign Person or Placeholder button for a project
A placeholder 'person' will appear at the top of the pop-up box. Choose the placeholder's role (Note: the placeholder rates and costs will come from the role.)
If you want to add multiple placeholders to a project at once, you can also do that.
Click Add another placeholder (Note: You can also add people at the same time as placeholders.)
If you change your mind and decide not to add the placeholder, you can simply uncheck the box on your right, and the row will disappear.
Click Add Selected
Find the placeholder under the chosen project. Create assignments as normal.
Editing placeholders
Right-click or click on the three-dot menu on the placeholder
Select Edit
Edit the placeholder's first name, last name, team, tags, skills and/or hourly cost.
Click Save
Cloning placeholders
Clone placeholders from the Project or People Planner to replicate a placeholder's assignments to more placeholders with the same role.
Right-click or click on the three-dot menu on the placeholder
Select Clone
Enter the number of placeholders you want to clone with the same assignments and role.
Click Clone
Transferring Placeholder Assignments
1. Transferring from a person to a placeholder
Right-click the assignment you want to transfer
Click Transfer. You'll enter Transfer mode.
From Transfer to, select Placeholders
Choose a placeholder or create a new placeholder.
2. Transferring from a placeholder to a person
You can transfer assignments from both the Project and People planners:
From the Project Planner
Click the 3-dot menu next to a placeholder
Select Transfer. You will enter Transfer mode.
From Transfer to, select People
Choose a person and click Transfer.
From the People Planner
Expand the placeholders row
Expand the placeholder role
Click the 3-dot menu next to a placeholder
Select Transfer. You will enter Transfer mode.
From Transfer to, select People
Choose a person and click Transfer.
Resourcing Requests
Create requests and use them to communicate with relevant stakeholders through comments, various request statuses, and planner filters.
Learn more here.