The bench and draft bookings

Flowtly Editorial Team5 min

Finding a gap in the plan is only half the job; the other half is knowing who can fill it. The bench keeps that answer on screen at all times, so filling a gap does not mean leaving the page and losing your place.

The bench

The bench is a strip pinned along the bottom of the Resourcing page. It stays put while the grid scrolls, and it lists everyone who still has room in the period currently on screen — most free first, so the people worth talking to first come first.

Each person appears as a chip showing how much of their time is uncommitted, for example 60% free. The count beside the heading — 8 free — is how many people have any room at all. Anyone fully booked is left out entirely: they are not available, so they are not offered.

Change the period and the bench changes with it. Someone free in September is not on the bench while you are looking at July.

Use the arrow on the Bench heading to collapse the strip when you want the full height for the grid, and to bring it back afterwards.

Read the percentage as a whole-period figure. 40% free means 40% of that person's capacity across the entire period on screen, not 40% in every week of it. Someone fully committed for eight weeks and completely free in the ninth can still read as partly free. It is worth expanding the role and checking the weeks before extending a booking across several of them.

Fully booked is advice, not a lock. The bench measures everyone against a normal full week, so once someone reaches 100% they read as having no room and drop off the strip. That is the page answering who can take this on comfortably — it is not saying the person cannot be booked at all.

Someone can still end up above a full week, and sometimes that is the right call. Because drafts are not counted as coverage, two drafts for the same person can each look affordable on their own; it is confirming them that adds up, and the grid marks anyone over 100% in red so the cost is visible rather than buried.

What will not happen is Flowtly proposing it. A person with no room is never offered on the bench, and dragging someone onto a role never books more than the time they actually have free — so going over a full week is always a decision you made, not a suggestion the page made for you.

There is a hard limit at 125%. Confirming a booking that would take someone past it is refused outright, and the message tells you how far over it would have gone.

When nobody has room, the strip says so plainly: Everyone is fully booked in this window.

Sketching a booking

Drag a person from the bench onto a role in the grid, and drop them on the column you want them booked in. Roles highlight as you drag, so it is clear where a chip can land.

Dropping creates a draft booking:

  • It covers the column you dropped on — one week in the Month view, one fortnight in the 90 days view, where each column is two weeks. (The last column of a 90-day period is sometimes a single week, and a drop there books that week alone.)
  • It is sized to the free capacity shown on the chip, and never above 100%, so the drop itself cannot overbook anyone.

To book a longer stretch, drop once and then extend the draft with the grips described below.

If a booking cannot be created, the page says why and the draft is removed again. The two reasons are told apart rather than guessed at: being refused because the drop would book someone past their capacity reads differently from being refused because you lack a permission, and the message names which it was.

Dragging is currently the only way to create a booking from this page.

What a draft is

A draft is a proposal. It is saved and your colleagues can see it, but it is not coverage.

Drafts appear as a dashed outline over the cell, and the label reads 40% draft. Crucially, draft bookings are left out of every coverage figure in the grid: role percentages, project averages and the over-capacity warnings all count confirmed bookings only. That is what makes drafts safe to experiment with — sketching three staffing options does not make a project look staffed three times over.

The practical consequence is worth knowing: a role that has only draft bookings still reads as uncovered. That is not a mistake. Nothing is committed yet.

Confirming a draft

Expand the role to see the people on it. A draft person's row carries a Confirm button; selecting it turns that person's draft on that role into a real booking. From that moment it counts as coverage everywhere, and the dashed outline becomes a solid bar.

Confirm works one person and one role at a time. There is no confirm-all.

Confirming needs the Resourcing Approver role, which is a narrower permission than the one that lets you create the draft in the first place. Proposing and committing were deliberately separated: anyone with the Resourcing Manager role can sketch a booking, but turning it into a commitment the company is counting on is a decision reserved for designated approvers. Administrators hold both.

Without that role the Confirm button is still shown on the row, but it is greyed out, and hovering it explains why: Confirming a draft needs the Resourcing Approver role. Ask an administrator to grant it. It is left visible on purpose — a planner should be able to see that the step exists and that it needs approval, rather than find the button missing and conclude the feature is broken. Proposing and committing sets out which role covers what.

Undoing a confirmation

A confirmed person's row carries an Un-confirm button, the mirror of Confirm: it turns their booking on that role back into a draft. The commitment is released, the bar returns to a dashed outline, and the time stops counting as coverage — so a confirmation made too early is not something you have to live with. The change is saved, and it survives reloading the page.

Un-confirming can never cause an over-booking, because it only ever removes committed time.

Un-confirming needs the Resourcing Approver role too, not only confirming. Releasing a commitment is as consequential as making one, and it is the first of the two steps that lead to a confirmed booking being deleted — so both ends of the commitment are held by the same permission.

As with Confirm, the Un-confirm button stays visible without that role and is greyed out, explaining on hover that turning a confirmed allocation back into a draft needs the Resourcing Approver role.

Deleting a draft

A draft person's row carries a small bin button beside Confirm. It removes that draft from the plan entirely — the proposal disappears from the grid rather than lingering as a suggestion nobody intends to act on.

Because this is the one action on the page that cannot be undone, it asks first, naming the person whose draft is about to go. Nothing is removed until you accept.

Only drafts can be deleted. A confirmed booking has no bin button, and the change would be refused even if it were attempted. This is deliberate: confirmed time is a commitment somebody is counting on, so clearing it away is two deliberate steps rather than one click. Un-confirm it first, then delete it. That extra step exists so that committed work is never a single misclick from vanishing.

Deleting a draft never affects anyone's coverage figures, because drafts were never counted as coverage to begin with.

Deleting a draft does not need the Approver role — creating a draft and withdrawing it are both proposing, and a proposal you can make is one you can take back.

The removal is permanent. The booking is not archived or hidden; it is gone, and it will not reappear anywhere in the plan. Flowtly does keep a record of the deletion — who removed it and when — but that record is the only remaining trace, and it is not something you can browse from this page. If it matters who removed a draft, ask your Flowtly administrator.

Adjusting a draft's length

The two small controls on a draft's row extend or shorten it by one week at a time, from the end. This is how a booking grows beyond the single column it was dropped into.

The start date cannot be moved here. To start a booking later, drop the person on the column where you want it to begin, rather than dropping earlier and trimming back.

Changing a draft's length or its percentage is proposing, not committing, so the Resourcing Manager role is enough — the Approver role is not needed for either.

What Flowtly records

Every change a person makes to a booking is recorded, along with who made it and when: creating it, confirming it, un-confirming it, changing its dates or its percentage, and deleting it. The record is kept indefinitely.

Bookings that arrive from an imported plan are the exception, including changes made to them here. They are mirrored from that plan rather than authored on this page, and re-mirrored whenever it is applied again, so the import's own report is their record instead.

There is no history view on the Resourcing page, so this is not something you can consult while you plan. It exists so that a question asked later — who committed this person, who released that booking, who removed the draft that used to be here — has an answer.

Example use cases

  • Find the open role on next month's project and fill it from the bench without leaving the page.
  • Sketch two ways of covering the same role as drafts, compare the grid, and confirm the better one.
  • Check who is genuinely free before agreeing to a new engagement's start date.
  • Book someone into the single week where the project is short, rather than for the whole quarter.
  • Extend a draft week by week until it covers the stretch the project actually needs, then confirm it.
  • Release a booking that was confirmed too early, so the person shows as available again while plans change.
  • Use the bench count as a weekly read on how much uncommitted capacity the team is carrying.

Connection map

Derived fromPart ofRefers toFulfilsUses upPlanned vs actual
Documented hereDocumented elsewhere
job-size sizes capacity. project needs role. role drawn from position. role declares demand. booking fills role. booking books person. absence reduces capacity. booking consumes capacity. bench derived from capacity. booking planned vs actual time-entry.sizesneedsdrawn fromdeclaresfillsbooksreducesconsumesderived fromplanned vs actualJJob Size — The employment capacity an agreement commits to, in hours and minutes per week. The FTE percentage is calculated from it rather than entered: someone whose hours per week equal their job size is full-time.Job SizeCCapacity — A person's contracted week, less absence. Bookings are measured against their own contracted week, so 20 hours fills 83% of a 0.6 FTE and not 50%.CapacityPProject — The core organizational unit for a business initiative, client engagement or internal work. Everything tracked — time, cost, invoicing, profitability — hangs off one.ProjectRRole — One job to be done on a project. It may be open, partly filled, filled or over-filled, and it exists whether or not anyone is booked on it.RolePPosition — The catalogue of job titles a project role is drawn from.PositionDDemand — What a role needs, stated apart from who is doing it. Stored as one slot per full-time person, so 2.5 people is three slots. A role with none declared is treated as one full-time person.DemandBBooking — One person committed to one role for a stretch of weeks, at a percentage of their time. A booking is a plan, not a record of work done.BookingPPerson — An employee. The central record the rest of the workforce data hangs off — profile, documents, leave, benefits, rates.PersonAAbsence — Approved time off. It removes hours from a person's week before any booking is counted against it.AbsenceTThe bench — Everyone with room left in the period on screen, most free first. Derived from capacity on every period change; never a list anyone maintains.The benchTTime entry — What actually happened — work time logged against a project.Time entry