Most planning tools will happily let you commit a team to six months of work that the fee cannot pay for, and tell you about it afterwards. Quantim puts the staff costs, the fee and the overrun on the same screen as the plan, while you are still moving people around.
Start a free trial Book a demoThe same plan, two ways round. The grid is where you commit hours; the chart is where you see whether the programme still works.
Activities down the side, people underneath them, weeks across the top. Put hours in a cell, or a percentage of somebody's week, whichever way your practice thinks.
The programme as bars, with a status on every one. Colour says whether it is in trouble; the fill says whether the time in it is booked or still an estimate.
The strip above the grid, updating as you resource. This is the part most planning tools do not have, and the reason a plan here is also a budget.
Who is on what, before anybody opens a Gantt chart. For the practices whose planning question is simply whether somebody is free in March.
Every activity carries its own status, its hours and its fee. Pick a numbered point to see what the row is telling you.
Four points on this screen.
The question every plan is really answering. Set your own numbers.
Capacity assumes a 37.5 hour week at 80 per cent chargeable, which leaves the fifth of the week that meetings, admin and training actually take.
An illustration from the figures you entered, not a measured result. It assumes everybody can work on everything, which no practice can.
The parts that make a plan worth keeping up to date.
Some practices plan in hours because that is how fees are built. Others plan in percentages because the real question is how much of somebody's week is already gone. The grid takes either.
Because each person carries their contracted hours, the two are the same number seen differently: 60 per cent of a 37.5 hour week is 22.5 hours, and the totals agree either way.
The same plan priced two ways. At charge rate it tells you what the work is worth; at cost rate it tells you what it costs you to deliver.
The gap between them is the margin the plan assumes, which is worth looking at before the job starts rather than at the end of it.
Approved holiday is already in the system, so the weeks somebody is away are not weeks you can plan them into. A planner that does not know about leave will cheerfully book a fortnight that does not exist.
The same goes for non chargeable time: practice administration has to live somewhere, and pretending it does not is how plans come apart.
Validate checks the programme for the things that quietly make a Gantt chart meaningless: activities with no dates, hours with nobody against them, work scheduled after the job is supposed to end.
It is the difference between a chart that is presented at a meeting and one that is trusted after it.
Planned hours are an estimate; recorded hours are what happened. Both sit on the same row, so the plan is corrected by reality every week rather than being a document somebody wrote in January.
That loop is also what makes the next quote better, because you can see what this kind of job actually took last time.
Nothing here is a separate system. The same job, the same people and the same numbers run through all of it.
A free trial takes a few minutes to set up, and no card. Or let us walk you through it against the way your practice actually plans work.
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