Soft and Hard Booking

The optional soft and hard booking feature enables you to differentiate between resource assignments that are tentative (soft booked) and those that are a confirmed part of the plan (hard booked). You can soft or hard book assignments for employees and for generic resources, and you can apply booking to assignments for both projects and opportunities.

Implement Soft and Hard Booking

To implement soft and hard booking, go to the Resource Settings form (Settings > Resource Planning > Resource Settings), and select Yes under Use Soft and Hard Booking for Assignments.

Note that if you turn on soft and hard booking and later decide to clear the Use Soft and Hard Booking for Assignments check box to turn off the feature, all existing assignments are automatically set to soft booked. If you then reactivate booking, they remain soft booked. The hard booked status is not restored to those assignments that had it before.

Control Who Can Hard Book

When you activate soft and hard booking, all existing resource assignments, by default, are soft booked, and no users have the necessary access rights to hard book assignment. To enable users to hard book assignments, go to the Planning tab on the Roles form (Settings > Security > Roles) and select Allow to Hard Book for those security roles that you want to authorize to hard book assignments.

Soft or Hard Book Assignments

You can set the booking status for resource assignments when you do either of the following in Resource View or Project View or on the Labor tab of the Plan form in the Projects hub:

• Add or edit resource assignments
• Reassign resource assignments

If you import resource assignments from a .CSV file or through an API, those assignments are all soft booked by default. Once you have imported them, you can change their booking status in either Resource View or Project View.

Some additional notes:

• The booking status for a resource assignment for a work breakdown structure element always applies to the entire assignment. For example, you cannot hard book planned hours for some of the days in the assignment date range and soft book the hours for the other days.
• Changing assignment dates or hours does not affect the assigned booking status. In other words, hard booking an assignment does not prevent you from adjusting dates or hours.
• If, when you reassign hours from one resource to another, you select Hard Book, and the reassigned hours are merged with another assignment that is soft booked, the entire merged assignment is hard booked. If you do not select Hard Book and the reassigned hours are merged with another assignment that is hard booked, the entire merged assignment is hard booked.

Booking Status and Calculations

In calculating planned hours totals, utilization percentages, or scheduled percentages, the application treats soft and hard booked assignments the same. Booking status does not affect those calculations. In the Reporting area of the Resource Planning application, however, you can filter reports to include or exclude assignment data based on booking status.

Filter Reports Based on Booking

If you include the Booking column on a report, you can filter that report based on that column to include or exclude assignments based on booking status. For example, you could generate a report that shows only the soft booked assignments so you can easily identify those that need to be confirmed.