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

The columns sit in three groups, so you can read the table left to right as money, people, then delivery.

Commercial

• Task — the deliverable, task, or bug. Click the name to open its details in the side panel. The header also carries the project's Income, taken from your approved quotes, so you can compare it against Budget at a glance.
• Budget — the agreed currency budget for that item. Click the cell to edit.
• Allocated for resourcing — the row's hours priced up using each member's rate card.

Resource allocation

• Member columns — one per person on the project, showing the hours allocated to them for that row. Click a cell to open the allocate editor. If a member has no rate card, Owners and Admins see a warning triangle beside their name — "No rate card set for this member, so costs on this page are misleading" — and a notice at the top of the page with a Manage members button.

Delivery

• Total deliverable hours — the sum of hours across all members for that row.
• Current worked hours — the currency value of time actually logged against the item. Hover it for a per-person breakdown of who logged what.

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.

Task and the Commercial columns stay pinned to the left as you scroll, and the Delivery columns to the right, so the member columns scroll between two fixed sets of figures.

Deliverables and their tasks

A deliverable's figures describe the deliverable itself. Expand it and a locked Cumulative row appears above its tasks, carrying the roll-up of everything nested beneath. The two are deliberately separate: the deliverable row is what you plan and resource with, and the cumulative row is there to check it against.

A deliverable inherits from its tasks until you tell it otherwise. Leave a member cell empty and it shows the total of that person's hours across the tasks below, in muted text, and keeps following them as the tasks change. Type a figure in and it holds that figure, regardless of what the tasks do afterwards. Clear the cell to hand it back to the tasks.

That inherited figure is real: it counts toward Total deliverable hours, it is priced into Allocated for resourcing, and Resourcing will schedule those people from it.

When figures need reconciling

If a deliverable's tasks add up to more hours than the deliverable itself allows for, both figures are flagged amber with the difference beside them, and a count appears at the top of the page. Hover either figure to see both numbers and the variance.

A deliverable planned above its tasks is not flagged — that is headroom, not a problem.

Adding people and work

Whether the whole table reads in hours or days is a toolbar setting, not something you choose per cell. The Hours / Days toggle switches every figure at once, and hovering Days tells you the day length it is converting at. Days stays unavailable until the workspace's calendar configuration has loaded, since without it there is no day length to divide by. Trellis remembers your choice in this browser for the workspace and shares it with Project resourcing, so both pages read in the same unit.

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.
• Project resourcing schedules Planning allocations week by week, and Resourcing rolls them 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.