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.
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.

What is Staff Planner software?
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 resources19 Dec 2025
Why Consultants Hate Timesheets (and How to Fix It with Coretime Time Tracking Software)
For many consultants, timesheets are the bane of professional life. Sitting down after a long day…
18 Dec 2025
Why Our Customers Choose Coretime for Smarter Time Management and WIP Tracking
Coretime time tracking and WIP software gives professional services businesses a competitive advantage by simplifying accurate…
11 Nov 2025
Implementing Coretime Without Disrupting Your Business: A Strategic Guide
Discover how to implement Coretime seamlessly. Download our Strategic Guide to Implementing Coretime Without Disrupting Your…
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Pete Stead – P+HS Architects
Optima Systems
Coretime provides an excellent service. Their team keeps us regularly updated, which means we always feel informed, supported, and confident that we’re getting the most out of the system.

Rob Price
Optima Systems
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.

Monica
Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust