In this help article, we show you how to set up the planning board for your business.
It will help you to plan your projects in both the short and long term - and keep your team informed at all times without any additional effort.
How does Craftnote tackle the topic of planning specifically?
On the one hand, a classic calendar is good for short deadlines, but it doesn't give you a real overview of your projects. If you want to see the availability of your team, the calendar starts to get confusing from 3 people at the latest.
On the other hand, although the planning board in Excel or on the wall is easy to use, it is only available in the office. Your team can't track important information and changes can't be easily accessed on a smartphone or tablet. Just like Dyou can only make changes in the office.
We have therefore developed a planning board that facilitates two things at once: the rough planning of future projects and granular resource planning. In the same application, you can see what is planned in 6 months and where an individual employee is specifically scheduled next week on Tuesday at 10:00 a.m..
Before you get started, please check a few settings first
First of all, you should enter the usual working hours of your company.
This input determines which times are displayed by default. Because if you display 24 hours, half of the screen is useless white space.
The input is very simple. Select the normal working start and end time and whether weekend days should also be displayed. If your working hours vary slightly, we recommend selecting the earliest possible start time and latest possible end time in order to remain flexible. These entries can of course be changed at any time using the orange "Settings" button.
Next, check that your entire team is displayed on the left in the planning board.
All internal employees are automatically displayed here. This means: If someone is missing, switch to the "Employees" settings area and invite the relevant employees here. Once they have registered, the employees are also displayed in the planning board.
You can also create resources to schedule them just like employees. For example, if there are special tools that cannot be found in every transporter or if vehicles are distributed as required, this can also be easily displayed via the planning board.
So now we can get started: In the first step, I'll show you how to do your rough planning.
The best way to do this is to switch from the weekly view to the monthly view.
You can navigate forwards and backwards using the arrows and we can create a 2-week project in a few months, for example. To do this, simply select a white line and decide whether you want to create an existing project or a new one.
When you create a new project, it will of course also be displayed in your project list.
The rough planning area is, just as the name suggests, more suitable for long-term rough planning. You may not yet know whether it will start on a Monday or a Wednesday in 5 months' time or exactly which colleagues will be realising the project - but if 4 projects are already planned in the calendar week, then you can see at a glance that you should perhaps offer another customer the next month.
Before the detailed planning, a little more information about the Teams function
Just click on the orange "TEAMS" button and a screen will open in which you can group your employees and resources by team.
If, for example, your foreman Gerhard always works together with the apprentice and a third colleague, you can create a team "Gerhard" and drag all three from the employee column to team Gerhard.
The order of the team can also be adjusted by dragging up or down. This means that these colleagues are always displayed together and you can schedule them together more quickly.
Once you have set up your teams, click on the orange ‘DONE’ button in the top right-hand corner and navigate back to the planning board.
Continue with the detailed planning
For example, you have decided to put Team Gerhard on the "BVH underfloor heating" project. If the project has already been created in the rough planning, then it can be done very quickly. Simply drag the project down to the relevant colleagues. The length of the entry can be extended or shortened by dragging to the right or left.
If the project has not yet been created in the rough planning, you can also assign it directly to an employee. To do this, click on the white cell on Monday in Gerhard's row. This opens the option to insert an existing project or create a new one.
The advantage of detailed planning is that you can see your team's workload at a glance. If there is a white gap somewhere, you know immediately that capacities are unused. If, for example, a customer calls and has to postpone an appointment or requests a maintenance appointment, your office team can see at a glance where there is free space and where there is not.
Information about the work types
Work types are special events that affect the capacity of your team, even though they are not projects. For employees, these include holidays, illness or your trainees' school days.
For resources, rather the information that something is defective or a maintenance reminder.
Everything can be mapped with this. These categories have the further advantage that they can also be used in parallel with a project. This makes it possible, for example, to map the emergency call service, as colleagues work during the day even if they are on duty during the week.
To create your own categories, you can click on "Edit menu" at the bottom right.
You can then create as many categories as you like via "Add category". Simply click on the category to edit or delete it.
Employee categories can only be assigned to employees and resource categories can only be assigned to resources. Makes sense 
Now you've done it! The working hours are set, your team is sorted correctly, your resources are created and your categories are ready. Now you can really get started. And the best thing is that all the changes you make now are also visible to your team. This means they can check the planning board on their mobile device at any time and are always up to date.
