Explore Your Resource Planning Trial Account

Explore your trial account and learn how Operating helps you plan your team’s time, staff projects, and forecast capacity and financials.

Your trial account comes pre-loaded with sample data so you can explore the platform right away. This guide walks you through the key areas.

Core Concepts in Operating

Projects, People, and Positions

Operating is built around three core entities: projects, people, and positions.

Projects represent your client engagements and internal work. People are your workforce. Positions are the link between the two. A position is a person, or a placeholder role, assigned to a project.

For example, “a business analyst working on Project X” is a position. Positions without a named person are open positions, which form your staffing pipeline.

Each of these entities can be viewed as a customizable list or on a visual timeline.

Working with Views

List Views

In list views, you can choose which columns to display using the display options.

For projects, this allows you to build dashboards showing financial metrics such as gross profit to date, percentage of budget spent, or planned margin, all in one view.

For people, list views can show availability, role, seniority, and other relevant attributes.

Timeline Views

The timeline is where you plan and schedule work.

On the people timeline, you see each person’s allocations across projects over time. Sorting by availability helps you quickly identify who has capacity in the coming weeks.

To adjust someone’s workload, click an allocation to edit it or drag the handles to extend or shorten it. Gray lines represent tentative allocations, while green lines represent confirmed ones. You can also book time off and assign internal project work directly on the timeline.

On the project timeline, opening a project shows its full team setup, including who is allocated, at what percentage, and for how long. From here, you can edit allocations, view the budget, and see the planned margin.

Project Financials

Each project shows a planned margin based on its team setup, budget, and billing type, whether fixed price or per hour.

Operating uses rate cards, what you charge your client, and cost cards, your labor costs, to calculate margins in the background.

Planned vs. Actual Tracking

For deeper insight, click Open details on a project to access the project status page.

For ongoing projects with tracked time, this page compares planned hours from the timeline against actual hours. You can see how work is tracking against the plan both cumulatively and period by period.

Even if you are not using Operating’s timesheet module, you can import time tracking data via CSV, the REST API, or from Harvest. This enables planned versus actual comparisons and helps you spot deviations, such as revenue leakage on per-hour projects or slow progress on fixed price work.

Filling Open Positions

Managing Open Roles

The Positions tab shows all positions across your project portfolio. Filtering by “Person is none” reveals open positions that still need to be staffed.

Each open position displays the required role, start date, and duration. Clicking Suggest prompts Operating to recommend people based on availability, site, role, seniority, and skills.

Once a person is assigned, the position disappears from the open list and appears on the timeline.

This view acts as your staffing to-do list. You can save it as a pinned view and share it with your staffing team.

Reports

The Reports section includes several forward-looking views that help with planning and forecasting.

Portfolio

Portfolio provides an overview of planned hours and estimated revenue across your project pipeline.

Capacity

Capacity shows future utilization, both tentative and confirmed, so you can see how booked your team is over the coming weeks and months.

Planned vs. Actual

Planned vs. Actual compares timeline allocations against tracked hours at the team level. You can define a deviation threshold to highlight where people are significantly over or under plan, helping surface workload issues early.

Customizing Your Workflow

Creating Pinned Views

You can save and pin any filtered view to make Operating fit your daily workflow. Pinned views appear in your sidebar and can be organized into folders.

Useful starting views include:

• My schedule, the people timeline filtered to you

• My projects, projects where you are a team member

• Team views, people filtered by role or team you manage

• Open positions, positions without an assigned person

Pinned views can also be shared with colleagues so teams can work from the same setup.

Navigation and Settings

Quick Navigation

Use Cmd+K on Mac or Ctrl+K on Windows to quickly navigate anywhere in Operating. This lets you jump to a person’s profile, open a project, or access settings without clicking through menus.

Account Settings

Explore the Settings area to see how your account is configured. This includes organization setup, sites, roles, and other system data that underpin planning and reporting.