Staff Planner

Coretime’s Staff Planner software makes resource scheduling and employee planning for professional services simple and efficient. Once team members are allocated to projects, they can record their time directly against scheduled tasks, giving managers real-time visibility into resource utilisation, workload, and project progress.

Full screen screenshot of coretime Staff Planner dashboard displaying activity classification and employee planner states for efficient resource planning.

What is Staff Planner software?

Staff Planner is a resource scheduling and employee allocation tool that lets professional services teams assign staff to tasks, plan workloads by hour/day/week, and match project needs with team availability. It’s particularly useful for companies that bill by time or deliver client projects on a schedule.

coretime Staff Planner dashboard on desktop showing activity classification and planner states for each employee.

Key Features & Capabilities

Flexible Staff Scheduling & Resource Allocation

  • Granular time allocation: Coretime’s Staff Planner lets you assign resources by hour, day, week, or month, supporting multi-project scheduling and detailed task-level planning. This improves workload balance and helps avoid over-booking or under-utilisation across client engagements.
  • Project hierarchy support: Schedule work at Project, Sub-Project, and Activity levels for detailed resource planning
  • Multi-Project scheduling: Allocate team members across multiple Clients and Projects within the same day
  • Bulk scheduling: Plan time for multiple Employees in a single entry for efficiency

Real-Time Scheduling Conflict Prevention

  • Automatic double-booking prevention: Prevent double-bookings with automatic conflict checking, ensuring your resource scheduling tool only allocates available team members to work — no surprises, no last-minute reshuffles.
  • Holiday integration: Automatically imports leave data from Leave Manager to prevent scheduling staff who are unavailable
  • Availability validation: System validates resource availability before confirming bookings

Budget-Aware Staff Planner & Cost Forecasting

  • Budget constraint enforcement: Automatic warnings when scheduled time exceeds Project budget ceilings
  • Cost forecasting: Understand financial implications of resource allocation before committing
  • Budget utilisation tracking: Monitor how scheduling decisions impact Project profitability

Visual Resource Scheduling & Planning Dashboard

  • Custom Planner States: Create color-coded categories (e.g., "Confirmed," "Tentative," "Flexible") for instant visual clarity
  • Customisable colours: Assign unique colours to different booking types for at-a-glance schedule understanding
  • Advanced filtering: View specific teams, departments, or Project-specific resources instantly

Integrated Staff Planner & Timesheet Tracking

  • Pre-populated timesheets: Scheduled work automatically appears in Employee timesheet "work to" lists
  • Simplified time entry: Staff only need to confirm actual hours worked, the rest of the time entry data is already filled out
  • Plan vs. Actual reporting: Compare scheduled hours against actual time spent for accurate Project tracking
  • Performance insights: Identify scheduling accuracy and Employee productivity trends

Staff Alerts & Outlook Calendar Sync

  • In-app notifications: Alerts appear within Coretime's timesheet area when new work is scheduled
  • Outlook calendar integration: Export scheduled items directly to Outlook calendars for unified schedule management
  • Real-time updates: Instant visibility into schedule changes and new assignments

Project Allocation

Wondering what this means for your management and your team?
With Coretime’s resource planning software, you get real-time visibility that keeps projects on track, prevents overbooking, and gives managers the insights they need to adjust staffing or schedules effortlessly.

Here’s how the Staff Planner can help:

For Management

  • Assign staff to clients: Allocate team members to specific clients to ensure accountability and clear ownership of client deliverables.
  • Schedule across projects or project phases: Plan staff resources for entire projects or individual phases, ensuring optimal coverage and alignment with project timelines.
  • Task-level allocation: Assign employees to specific tasks within projects, enabling precise tracking of time, effort, and responsibilities.
  • Flexible Time Scheduling: Schedule work by full day, half day (AM/PM), or hourly increments to reflect real-world availability and workload variations.
  • Multi-task and stage-based scheduling: Assign multiple tasks to the same day or link tasks to specific project stages/phases, maximising productivity and avoiding scheduling conflicts.

For Staff

  • Review scheduled work with staff planner software: Managers can easily review all work scheduled for staff, ensuring assignments align with project priorities and deadlines.
  • Enter time against scheduled tasks with resource planning software: Employees log their hours directly against assigned tasks, enabling accurate project tracking and real-time visibility into resource utilisation.
  • Check upcoming tasks using an employee scheduling tool: View future work at a glance to proactively manage workloads, prevent overbooking, and adjust assignments as needed.

Who benefits from Staff Planner? Staff Planner is ideal for:

Professional Service Firms

Who require detailed Project resource allocation.

Creative Agencies

Who manage multiple Client Projects simultaneously.

Consulting Organisations

That Need hourly-level scheduling precision.

Engineering Firms

Who are tracking resources across complex Project hierarchies.

& Teams of 10+ Employees

With multiple projects to management.

Latest resources

View all our resources
  • Blog

06 May 2026

The Power of Integrated Time Tracking and CRM for Professional Services

Read more
  • Blog

21 Apr 2026

Best Top 5 Consulting Software for 2026

Read more
  • Blog

13 Apr 2026

The Hidden Cost of Manual Expense Management in Professional Services

Read more
  • Blog

08 Apr 2026

Fixed Fee vs Hourly Billing: Which Makes You More Money? (A Practical Guide)

Compare fixed fee vs hourly billing to see which model drives better project profitability, improves cash flow, and supports stronger client satisfaction.

Read more
  • Blog

02 Apr 2026

The Silent Profit Killers Behind “Good Enough” Time Tracking

Many consulting firms rely on memory, spreadsheets, or basic timers, treating time tracking for consulting firms…

Read more
  • Download

19 Mar 2026

The Coretime Quick Info Pack

If you’re new to Coretime this handy quick information pack from our expert team is the…

Read more
  • Blog

04 Mar 2026

Why Coretime Is Truly Different: A Powerful SaaS Built on Real Partnership

Coretime is more than a timesheet, CRM and project management platform. Discover why our UK-based SaaS focuses on partnerships, customer relationships, and growing alongside the businesses we support.

Read more
  • Blog

01 Mar 2026

Top 5 Time Tracking Challenges (and How to Fix Them With a Time Tracking System)

This article explores the top five time tracking challenges businesses face and shows how a modern time tracking system can reduce write-offs, improve billing accuracy, and turn time data into a genuine strategic

Read more
  • Blog

28 Feb 2026

Why Resource Utilisation Really Matters: Maximise Your Team’s Potential

Learn how to measure efficiency, balance workloads, and make informed decisions to keep projects on track with practical tips and insights for maximising your team’s productivity.

Read more

You’re in good company

Join the growing number of businesses transforming their operations with Coretime, starting from just £20/€25 per user per month. Our customers are strengthening client relationships, gaining real-time project visibility, and driving measurable growth.

Explore their success stories below and see how Coretime can deliver powerful results for your organisation at a price that makes sense.

Aircraft Leasing & Management

We have recently purchased Coretime through Onesys and were impressed with their responsiveness to our original enquiry and to our subsequent questions. The process for understanding what the software could do for us was efficient and straightforward, as was the administration involved in setting-up the account and finalising the agreement.

Aircraft Leasing & Management Logo

Nicola Plummer

Aircraft Leasing & Management

AJA Architects

For us, the main benefit is that our system is now more user-friendly in terms of project managers being able to access information, such as seeing how a project is performing against budget. They can analyse how time is being spent and what proportion of it is earning fees – it’s easy to translate.

AJA Architects Logo

Matt Simpson

AJA Architects

Callisto Consulting

Since purchasing Coretime our time spent on administrative tasks, especially around invoicing has greatly reduced. We can also now respond to Client queries much more efficiently and with a more accurate, trusted response.

Overall the processes that we undertake using Coretime are much quicker and simpler and along with the benefits we’re now receiving in how we can report on our Project data using different parameters, we expect to see a return on investment within a year based on administration time saved.

Callisto Consulting Logo

Paul Bunyan

Callisto Consulting

R.G. Parkins & Partners

The Coretime system is easy to use, accurate, and has helped to increase our efficiencies, we would absolutely recommend it to other companies in that we find it invaluable.

R G Parkins & Partners Logo

David Heron

R.G. Parkins & Partners

GWP Engineering Consultants

Coretime are a real business partner, I find them very helpful, and if I have any questions or queries the support team is there to help me instantly. In short, we’re delighted.

GWP Consultants Logo

Amanda Godwin

GWP Engineering Consultants

Caulmert

With staff based at different office locations and sometimes different parts of the world, having Coretime has brought us all together using one easily accessible web based system.

Caulmert Logo

Donna Milne

Caulmert

JNP Group

Coretime is one of the most important packages within the business and is based on an annual subscription with full cloud access. This is a truly fantastic system and very affordable for a company of our size, it’s a fraction of the cost of some systems such as Autodesk and Microsoft.

JNP Group Logo

Jamie Seabrook

JNP Group

Deaton Lysaght

Coretime is simply the easiest, yet the most economically advantageous programme that does so much more than just time management. The overall impact of Coretime has improved both productivity and efficiency.

Elizabeth Churchard

Deaton Lysaght

Pete Stead – P+HS Architects

A huge positive for us is the reduction of double entry of information, not having to manipulate information and enter it somewhere else has made such a drastic difference to how we run our business, we can’t imagine not having Coretime now!

P+HS Logo

Pete Stead – P+HS Architects

Spark Architects

We will be able to easily track non-billable work such as fee proposals and revisions, track outstanding invoices versus paid, and understand budget versus actuals and profitability at both project level and RIBA stages.

Spark Architects

Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust

It’s cut the time spent on routine administrative tasks and enabled us to be more efficient, which means we can focus more on the actual projects. We can have around 20 live projects on the go at any one time and if a client wants a breakdown of where the time is going, we need to respond almost instantly.

WWT Logo

Monica

Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust