Overview of hours, FTE, and cost information in the Project and Role views of the Resource Planner
Budgeting your resources for the work they must accomplish on a project is the main function of the Resource Planner. You can view your resources’ available time as well as allocate their time to the projects where they are assigned.
For information about budgeting resources in the Resource Planner, see Budget resources in the Resource Planner using the Project and Role views
This article describes some of the key concepts that you need to know before starting to budget your resources in the Resource Planner.
Budgeting resources overview
Consider the following when budgeting resources using the Resource Planner:
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You can budget the allocation of your resources by specifying an amount of Hours, FTE, or Cost that your resources can use to complete work on projects. When you budget time or cost for a resource, the Available Hours, FTE, or Cost for the resource decreases by the amount budgeted. As a result the Available Hours, FTE, or Cost amounts for the projects that follow the project for which you are budgeting decreases for those users and roles on those projects.
note important IMPORTANT You can budget your resources for a period of 15 years. If you budget resources for a project with a duration longer than 15 years the budgeting information might not be accurate. -
You can budget Hours, FTE, or Cost for your resources for any time frame displayed in the Resource Planner, independent of the timeline of the project. For example, if you want to indicate that your resources might not be available during the timeline of the project (where they are associated with Planned Hours), but they might be available during another time, you can do so by budgeting them for time frames where the Planned Hours are zero, if that is when they become available to work. You can manually change the timeline of the project to match your resource availability after you do this.
note note NOTE We recommend that you manually budget your Hours, FTE, or Cost for job roles or for users first. You can use the automatic options to budget time for your projects and resources only when you are sure that the amount of Planned Hours, FTE, or Cost should always match your Budgeted Hours, FTE, or Cost.
For information about using the automatic options for budgeting in the Resource Planner, see the section “Budget project and roles automatically” in the article Review resource availability and allocation using the ۶Ƶ Workfront Resource Planner. -
Budgeting FTE or costs is identical with budgeting hours, where ۶Ƶ Workfront uses the FTE and cost values instead of hours for the resources you budget.
For more information about understanding how Costs are calculated in the Resource Planner, see Calculate costs in the Resource Planner.
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Budgeting allocations for your resources in the Resource Planner is done in the following ways:
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Manually
Or
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Automatically, by using the project and role options in the View by Project and View by Role views.
For more information, see Budget resources in the Resource Planner using the Project and Role views.
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When a user changes job roles, is deleted, deactivated, or removed from a Resource Pool, the hours budgeted for the role do not change and they get redistributed to the remaining users in the role. If no user is associated with the job role anymore, the Budgeted Hours for the role become zero.
For more information about the project and role options, see the section Understand the values of Hours, FTE, and Cost in the Resource Planner in this article.
Understand the values of Hours, FTE, and Cost in the Resource Planner understand-the-values-of-hours-fte-and-cost-in-the-resource-planner
Before budgeting your resources, and updating the Budgeted Hours information in the Resource Planner, you must be familiar with the following concepts
- Planned Hours, FTE, or Cost: The work that needs to be done as defined on tasks and issues.
- Available Hours, FTE, or Cost: The amount of time that users or job roles are available to work, according to the schedules associated with the users.
This information displays in the Resource Planner for each resource (user or role) and for each project.
For information about what displays in the Project and Role Views of the project, see the article Resource Planner navigation overview.
For information about understanding how Costs are calculated in the Resource Planner, see the article Calculate costs in the Resource Planner.
The following tables show the allocation and availability information that displays in the Resource Planner when applying either the Project or the Role view. You can view this information by Hours, FTE, or Cost:
The AVL (Available) column the-avl-available-column
The PLN (Planned) column the-pln-planned-column
Consider the following when viewing Planned Hours:
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Although you cannot see information about task allocations in the Resource Planner in the Project and Role views, the amount of Planned Hours comes from the Planned Hours on the tasks in the projects.
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Planned Hours are equally distributed to each day within the Duration of tasks, for each resource assigned to them. The task Duration is based on the task Planned Start and Completion Dates and includes every calendar day within that period of time.
Workfront takes into account the schedule of the user or of the project when distributing Planned Hours to users or projects. In this case, Planned Hours are equally distributed to each day within the Duration of tasks excluding weekends, time-off days, and schedule exceptions.
If you display the Resource Planner by Week, for example, and you have tasks that span multiple weeks on projects, the number of Planned Hours per week depends on how many days within that week are part of the task Duration. This works similarly when displaying the Resource Planner by Month or Quarter and when tasks span multiple months or quarters.
Weekend days, schedule exceptions, and time-off days are excluded from this distribution. -
The following categories of tasks are included in calculating the Planned Hours for each resource:
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tasks assigned to users in Resource Pools, job roles, or teams on the project
If tasks are assigned to teams, their allocation will appear under No Role and No User sections. You can see the Planned Hours associated with teams, but you cannot budget the hours, because no roles nor users are associated with the tasks. -
unassigned tasks
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Planned Hours in the Resource Planner do not include Planned Hours associated with the following:
- parent tasks
- tasks assigned to users with no Resource Pools
- issues, when the Include hours from Issues setting is disabled.
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Planned Hours do not display in the Resource Planner if the task Duration is zero.
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Planned Hours associated with deactivated users do not display.
The BDG (Budgeted) column the-bdg-budgeted-column
Consider the following when working with Budgeted Hours:
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You can budget resources only when you have Edit access to Resource Management and Financial Data and Manage Finance permissions on the projects.
For information about the access needed for budgeting resources, see the article Access needed to budget resources in ۶Ƶ Workfront.
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By default, the Budgeted Hours in the Resource Planner are zero for all resources and for all the projects.
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You can manually estimate the Budgeted Hours for users and roles, or you can use one of the links in the Project or Job Role More menus to update them according to the number of Planned Hours.
For more information about project and role options, see the section Overview of hours, FTE, and cost information in the Project and Role views of the Resource Planner in this article. -
The smallest period of time you can budget hours, FTE, or Cost for is a week. You cannot budget hours, FTE, or Cost for a day.
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Budgeted Hours are equally distributed to each day within the Duration of tasks, for each resource assigned to them. The task Duration is based on the task Planned Start and Completion Dates and includes every calendar day within that period of time.
Workfront takes into account the schedule of the user or of the project when distributing Budgeted Hours to users or projects. In this case, Budgeted Hours are equally distributed to each day within the Duration of tasks excluding weekends, but including time-off and schedule exceptions.
If you display the Resource Planner by Week, for example, and you have tasks that span multiple weeks, the number of Budgeted Hours per week depends on how many days within that week are part of the task Duration. Weekend days are excluded from this distribution. This works similarly when displaying the Resource Planner by Month or Quarter and when tasks span multiple months or quarters.
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You can report on Budgeted Hours, by selecting Budgeted Hour as your report object for a new report.
For information about what objects you can report on in Workfront, see the section “Report on objects” in the article Understand objects in ۶Ƶ Workfront.
For information about building a Budgeted Hour report, see the article Report: Budgeted Hour.
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Hours previously budgeted for users who were later deactivated do not display.
Note that the Budgeted Labor Cost of a project still includes the budgeted hours for users who were deactivated in the Resource Planner.
For example: If a role is assigned to two users and budgeted hours are added (20 hours per user, totaling 40 hours), and then the total is set manually for the role, deactivating one of the users in the Resource Planner causes their hours to no longer be considered in the calculation (dropping the total to 20 hours). However, the project budgeting correctly retains the manually set total for the role, so the deactivated user’s hours are still included in the calculation (remaining at 40 hours).