How to log in

There are two ways to access https://use.operating.app the first time around

1. Follow the invitation in your email inbox from Operating – just set a password and you’re in

2. If your company is using single sign on (SSO), use it to get in

The login page asks for Company name, your admins know what this is. For example, for Acme Consulting it is something like acme-consulting

If you don’t know how to get in, drop us a line at support@operating.app and we’ll figure it out.

What can you do with Operating

Operating helps you with:

1. Capacity planning & resource planning

   1. Plan teams for upcoming projects, manage your project staffing, and forecast your capacity

   2. Manage workloads and forecast utilization

2. Forecasting revenue, and managing project financials

   1. Forecast your revenue for confirmed projects and projects in your sales pipeline

   2. Monitor project profitability with project budgets, charge-out rates, and cost cards

3. Time tracking

   1. Track time (timesheets) on projects and compare planned hours to actual hours spent

4. Invoicing

   1. Create invoices and send them to your invoicing platform (like Quickbooks or NetSuite)

The core product consists of the resource planning capabilities. These functionalities can then be extended by the time tracking and invoicing module, as well as integrations to other platforms.

The app has five main areas

• Horizon for planning new projects → lists of projects, open positions to be filled and people available

• Timeline with Projects and People for scheduling work

• Reports

• Hours for time tracking

• Invoicing

1. Capacity planning & Resource planning

• You can connect Operating to your CRM and assign placeholder teams to upcoming projects to let your team see which roles and skill sets are in demand. You can also assign people (not placeholders) directly on upcoming projects.

• When you’ve added the team setup and scheduled the work, you’ve successfully staffed the projects.

• Everyone in your company can see who’s working on what and who has availability now and in the future.

• For every Person in Operating, you have roles, a seniority level, skills and other metadata.

Above: Martina knows UX/UI, service design, facilitation and English. She’s a Senior Designer, currently 45% booked and has another 20% of tentative workload for a project for Nordnet.

1.1 How Operating forms a utilization forecast

The work allocations (people scheduled to projects, like Martina above) form a bottom-up forecast of all of the work that’s confirmed or tentative. Of course they’re just plans, but still, it’s often the best guess of your company’s utilization for the next months.

This information is summed up for a utilization forecast that you can filter based on all the different variables in the system.

2. Forecasting revenue, and managing project financials

• You can add project budgets, role- and seniority-based charge-out rates, and consultant costs into the system to have a basis for estimating the revenue and profitability of your project portfolio

• Similarly to the utilization forecast, Operating will give you your company’s revenue forecast by summing up all upcoming project revenue (shown below)

• By adding charge-out rates and cost cards, you can get a real-time estimate of your projects’ gross margin.

3. Time tracking: follow planned vs actual hours

• You can track time spent in Operating Hours. If you’re using another platform to track time, you can bring the time entries into Operating with an integration or via CSV.

• Time tracking in itself is quite mundane, but the real value comes from the comparison of plans and actuals.

  • During sales phase, you estimate the scope to your best knowledge

  • Resourcing (scheduling and allocating time) is often optimistic: you might not remember to factor in sick leaves and other interruptions to work

  • It’s common for the scope and schedule to change during the project

  • When you compare planned vs actuals per project or per person, you can see when things start(ed) to go over or under the estimates.

The list view - all time entries and descriptions visible

TIP: Click the settings icon at the top right of the screen on the Hours tab to access the List view

• See all time entries in a list day by day

• Duplicate time entries if you work on the same task multiple times across one day

• Copy-paste your previous day’s entries by clicking copy previous day to quickly log repetitive work. This is especially useful, if your clients are not that strict on keeping notes on what was done, but you need the hours for billing.

• Always have the time entry description visible for quick logging of notes

4. Invoicing

You (or your finance team) can set billing cycles for projects and create invoices using Operating. Operating supports creating invoices based on time & materials, and fixed price work, as well as creating free form invoices from scratch.

This might not be something you’re dealing with in your daily work, but it’s good to understand invoicing is also on the platform.

Top things to understand about Operating

1. Horizon: Add upcoming work with just enough detail about the team setup, run your resource planning weekly, fill open positions in projects, and skim through your available consultants

2. Timeline: Maintain ongoing workloads, see your team’s detailed capacity, plan project budgets and monitor gross margins for projects

3. Reports: Forecast your revenue and utilization, monitor planned work vs. actual hours spent to see if your plans were realistic

4. Your own profile: Make sure your skills are up to date. Add a short bio about yourself. People building teams will use Operating to pick the right person for each job, and they need to know more about you.

5. Don’t worry about being 100.0% accurate in planning upcoming work. Start somewhere and adjust when necessary. Time tracking will reveal the truth, and that’s fine! You want to see the deviation between plans and actuals to be able to improve.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this for managers only or should individual consultants also update Operating?

→ We don’t think anyone should spend a huge amount of time updating allocations and doing busywork. If your company works best when someone handles resourcing on others’ behalf, keep it that way. On the other hand, if it’s smoother to have everyone update their plans, do that.

What tools does Operating.app replace?

→ Operating is a professional services automation platform, and replaces multiple tools. We’ve replaced resource management apps, spreadsheets, and time tracking tools, or an outdated agency ERP. Some companies have canceled their skill management app subscriptions and chosen to manage people’s skills in Operating instead.

Why did we build Operating?

There’s a whole story on it on our website, but we’ll give a more technical answer below.

Operating is not a CRM. It’s not an HRIS tool. You may still need finance software like QuickBooks to manage your P&L and cash flow. So what is it?

While many agency platforms take an “all-in-one” approach, at Operating we’ve built a platform that focuses on just the right mix of use cases — everything you need, without the excess.

Operating handles the core consulting workflows: resource planning, utilization and business forecasting, time tracking, and invoicing. These aren’t generic workflows; they are the specialized processes that make a professional services business unique.

For everything outside the consulting core, such as CRM, HR, and finance, we offer integrations to best-in-class tools. This way, you use purpose-built software where it matters most. Smart, isn’t it?

You should be rightfully hesitant about relying on a full-blown agency ERP or PSA (professional services automation) to manage everything — finances, HR, sales, and operations all in one place. In reality, these platforms often force compromises. Operating doesn’t try to replicate everything an old-school ERP covers. And if your PSA no longer sparks joy, it might be time for something better.

Who is responsible for keeping work allocations up-to-date?

→ The one who knows best. In the sales phase, it’s often the salesperson. They might even use Operating Timeline to plan the shape of the work to come before sending a proposal to the client.

→ However, when the handover happens from sales to project delivery, the Project Owner is likely to change. It may be the project manager. This is not always simple, and we support adding secondary owners to projects as well.

→ In some companies individual people are given a lot of autonomy and responsibility for their own work planning. In these cases it is natural to follow a process in which each person plans their months or weeks ahead to their best knowledge.

Trivia

Keyboard shortcuts and other time-savers

• Try hitting arrows up, down, left or right while punching entries in the Hours timesheet.

Skills can have levels, feelings and notes related to them

• When you’re filling your own professional profile, you’re able to add skill levels (beginner) and feelings (I want to learn) and notes (studying this on the weekends). Try it out!

• Video: Edit your professional profile

Saving common filtering criteria as Views is a good idea

• Filtering people and projects is a very common thing to do in Operating – you’re looking up things like “how are our developers doing” or “what tentative projects are there in the UK” → clicking the filters off and on again might get tedious. If you find yourself looking at the same things often, save it as a View. Views can also be shared with others.