Under Administration > Projects > Settings, you configure the behavior of Project Planning company-wide. With the module active, ZEP adds the plan-related fields at several places in the form, described below by functional area.

When a project or task reaches certain percentage shares of the stored planned hours, ZEP automatically sends an escalation email to the project managers. The following fields control whether and at which stages these emails are sent.

In the Plan warning field, you choose between two options. Do not send an email deactivates the escalation mechanism entirely. Specify thresholds makes the three input fields for the thresholds and the billable only checkbox visible and activates sending.

When the plan warning is activated, you enter up to three percentage levels at which ZEP triggers an email to the project managers. Three levels enable a graduated escalation path, for example 50, 80, and 95 percent.

At 50 percent, project managers get an early indication and can assess the situation. At 80 percent, the typical pre-warning follows with enough buffer to take countermeasures. At 95 percent, the acute escalation is in place shortly before the plan ends.

Directly below the thresholds, the checkbox billable only appears. When active, only bookings marked as billable flow into the threshold calculation. Useful when internal efforts such as onboarding, training, or status meetings should not count toward the plan budget.

In the section Show in the i-bullet of tasks, the checkbox Planned and actual hours activates the additional inline display during time recording. As soon as it is active, employees see directly in the recording form how many planned hours are stored and how many have already been booked.

Beside that, the section contains further general display options for the task selection such as the visibility of the task note, task date, assigned employees, or the restriction to own or to bookable tasks within the recording period. These are not plan-specific and apply independently of the module.

What employees specifically see when plan display is active and how the behavior differs with overbooking protection active is described in the article Planned hours during time recording.

In the lower part of the settings, you control which plan information employees without a project lead role may view. A general release and three fine-grained follow-up checkboxes are combined for this.

The checkbox All project employees may see the Project Plan menu item decides whether employees without a project lead role can also open the Project Plan menu item on the project detail page. When the checkbox is deactivated, the project plan is only visible to project managers, controllers, and administrators.

As soon as the general release is active, three follow-up checkboxes appear for the individual value groups in the project plan:

This allows the project plan to be opened for employees as needed without disclosing sensitive cost information.