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Track a crew as one resource

Pro plan Owner, Admin, or Portfolio Manager

Some teams plan work by crew rather than by person: a survey crew of four, an install team, a shift. Onplana plans people, so the way to plan a crew today is to give it one account and treat that account as the crew. This page shows how to set that up, and where it stops working.

Set up the crew account

Section titled “Set up the crew account”

  1. Invite the crew as one member, at an address the crew lead receives mail at, for example crew-north@yourcompany.com, with the Member role. Give it a name people will recognise in the assignee picker, such as North survey crew.

  2. Add it to the projects the crew works on, and assign crew work to it like any other person.

  3. In Timesheet > Capacity Planner, open the Weekly view and set the crew’s available hours to the crew’s combined week, for example 160 for four people working 40 hours.

Set the crew’s hours for several weeks at once

Section titled “Set the crew’s hours for several weeks at once”

Available hours are stored week by week. A week nobody set falls back to the organization’s working calendar, usually 40 hours, which for a crew of four reads as a quarter of its real capacity. So set the weeks ahead in one go:

  1. In the Capacity Planner toolbar, change Set hours for from This week only to the span you want: 4, 8, 13 or 26 weeks, starting with the week on screen.

  2. Click the crew’s value in the Available column. The editor says how many weeks the value will go to, for example for 13 weeks.

  3. Type the hours and press Enter. The confirmation says how many weeks were set.

To carry a week’s hours forward without changing them, choose the span, open the crew’s value and press Enter without editing it. Clicking away without typing still saves nothing, whatever the span, so a stray click cannot set half a year of hours. A value that was never set (shown in grey italics) is not carried forward this way; type the hours instead.

The span resets to one week when you leave the page, so the next single-week fix does not quietly reach 26 weeks.

Where the approach runs out

Section titled “Where the approach runs out”

One account standing in for several people works for planning a crew as a unit. It does not turn the account into a team, and these limits follow from that:

  • About four full-time people per account. A week holds at most 168 hours, so one account cannot show more than that. Split a larger crew across two accounts.
  • At most 24 hours per task per day. A time entry holds up to 24 hours, and a task takes one entry per day, so four people each working 8 hours on the same task on the same day cannot all be logged against it. Log the crew’s time across the tasks it actually worked on, or split the crew.
  • One person enters the crew’s time. The account cannot tell crew members apart, so reports show the crew, never who within it. Have the crew lead enter the week rather than sharing the sign-in: a shared sign-in cannot use two-step verification per person and leaves no record of who changed what.
  • Set hours do not subtract time off. Once you set the crew’s hours for a week, approved time off is not taken off them. When a crew member is away, lower that week’s hours yourself.
  • One rate. Rate cards resolve per account, so the crew costs and bills at a single rate. If crew members are paid differently, the blended rate is the one to use.
  • Expenses. Logging expenses needs Services to be turned on for your workspace.

If you need individual hours, individual rates or individual time off, give each crew member their own account and use a team to group them. See Plan team capacity.

FAQs

Section titled “FAQs”

Does the crew account take a paid seat? Yes. It is a Member, and Members are billed seats. A Guest crew uses one of your plan’s free guest seats instead, and a guest beyond that allowance is billed like a Member. A Guest crew counts in the planner only in weeks where it logged time or has hours set, and timesheet compliance never checks it.

Can a member set their own hours for several weeks? Not yet. Set hours for is in the Capacity Planner, which Owners, Admins and Portfolio Managers use. A member sets their own availability from their timesheet, one week at a time.

Can I undo a multi-week change? Set the hours again for the same span. There is no single undo for it.

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