Planning

When a client approves a project proposal, it's normally a long way from an executable plan. Planning is where a project stops being a list of tasks and starts being a plan you can allocate to staff and carefully resource so your delivery is on point.

Every deliverable and task sits in one table with columns for each project member. As you allocate effort (in time) to people across your task list, you can see how your planned spend aggregates against the budget you sold the project for.

What you'll see

The table lists every deliverable in the project as a parent row, with its tasks nested underneath. Rows begin in collapsed state; you can expand a deliverable to individually plan nested tasks.

Any task or bug that isn't linked to a deliverable is grouped at the bottom under Others, so nothing falls out of the plan.

The columns

• Task — the deliverable, task, or bug. Click the name to open its details in the side panel.
• Budget — the agreed currency budget for that item. Click the cell to edit.
• Member columns — one per person on the project, showing the hours you've allocated to them for that row. Click to edit.
• Total hours — the sum of hours across all members for the row.
• Allocation — total hours priced up using each member's rate card. Turns red when it exceeds the row's Budget.
• Worked — hours actually logged against the item, and the currency value of that logged time (also priced from the rate card).

The header row shows the same totals aggregated across the whole project, giving you a quick read on whether your plan fits the overall budget.

Parent rows and the split view

When a deliverable has children, its Total hours and each member cell show two numbers side by side: hours booked on the deliverable itself, and the sum of hours booked on its children. If the two don't reconcile, the cell flags a mismatch — a signal to check whether the parent estimate still matches the work broken down beneath it.

Adding people and work

How Planning relates to other tools in Trellis

• Tasks is the working list — statuses, assignees, sprints. Planning is the same tasks arranged for capacity and cost.
• Timeline turns your plan into dates. Planning answers how much; Timeline answers when.
• Resourcing rolls Planning allocations up across every project so you can see who's over- or under-utilised across the business.
• Profitability on the Project Overview reads from Planning's allocation numbers and Worked totals to compute margin.

Who can do what

Planning is a workspace-level Editor-and-above view. Members, Contributors, and Viewers don't see the tab — they work from Tasks and their own timesheet.