How To Use Placeholders in Scheduling

Now, more than ever before, agencies and service providers need predictability.

Agency owners and CEOs want to be able to foresee upcoming revenue and expenses, while project managers want the ability to forecast work for months in advance. Simultaneously, you need to balance the scope of new projects and client expectations and your people—making sure that teammates aren’t overwhelmed and nearing burnout.

Knowing how important placeholding work is for forecasting the success and future of your agency, Productive is now happy to introduce Placeholders. It’s an addition to Scheduling that many of our existing customers have asked for, so we listened!

Placeholders are a new way to book upcoming work—ideal for planning the future of your agency in the short to long term. 

Does your gut feeling tell you that you need to hire for the upcoming month, or that your resources will affect the future profitability of a long-term project? Are you uncertain about how a project may evolve and wondering whether you’re already using your existing teammates’ capacities? 

Placeholders are here to solve those problems. It’s the evolution of our Scheduling feature, oriented purely towards the near (or further) future. So what are all the benefits of using Placeholders in Productive?

1. You can schedule upcoming work 

Using Placeholders, you can precisely plan upcoming projects i.e. plan and track your agency’s upcoming workload.

2. You can see where you need to allocate existing teammates’ time

By scheduling upcoming work, you automatically know where you’ll need to allocate your existing teammates’ time.

3. You can plan to hire freelancers or contractors ahead of time

Having a clear perspective on current and upcoming work will also tell you whether your agency needs to hire new talent, freelancers, or contractors in the near future.

4. You can have a better overview of your upcoming expenses

To best plan your agency’s upcoming expenses, you can assign cost rates to Placeholders and forecast your future profitability.

5. You have more accurate Reports and a future perspective on financial reporting

You can view your Placeholders in Reports as though they are employees, which gives you more overall financial predictability.

Placeholders are one of Productive’s Premium features. When you sign up for our premium package, your agency has the option of using a total of five Placeholders.

To find out how exactly to use Placeholders within Scheduling in Productive, visit our Help Page. For any questions, contact our Sales or Support team.