As soon as planned hours are stored in a project or task, the effect on employees' time recording is directly noticeable. How strongly depends on the settings made. This article describes from an operational perspective what employees and project managers experience during booking and which setting produces which effect.
Inline display during booking
The inline display of planned and actual hours is a pure display function. It does not change the booking behavior but creates transparency about the current plan status.
Prerequisite in the basic settings
For the inline display, the checkbox Planned and actual hours in the section Show in the i-bullet of tasks must be active in the basic settings.
Display during booking
When recording a project time under Project Times > Record, ZEP displays the stored planned hours, the sum of the actual hours recorded so far, and the difference as remaining budget directly at the selected project or task. Employees thus see the plan status already before saving and can classify their booking in the context of the overall budget.
Example: A person wants to book two more hours on a task in the morning. ZEP shows directly in the recording dialog that 36 of 40 planned hours are already used and only 4 are left. The person books the two hours but keeps in mind that the task will soon need to be closed.
Warning when budget runs low
Anyone who wants to react to escalation emails instead of technically blocking bookings uses the plan warning with percentage thresholds. The booking goes through normally, but the project managers automatically receive an email as soon as a configured threshold is reached.
The exact configuration of the thresholds and the behavior of the multi-stage setup is described in the article Storing planned hours in the section Escalation email when thresholds are reached.
Tip: If you do not want to slow employees down with a hard block but still need an early warning, combine the plan warning with the activated inline display: employees see the status during booking, project managers are informed in parallel by email.
Overbooking protection
When the planned hour limit should be enforced hard, activate the checkbox Prevent overbooking in the project or task. ZEP rejects time bookings that would exceed the planned hours when saving. Employees receive the message This time cannot be booked, since thereby the planned hours of the project/task were exceeded.
Options for the affected employees
Employees have three options in this case:
reduce the booking to the remaining plan budget
allocate the booking to another project or another task
contact the project lead so that the planned hours field is increased or the protection is lifted
Only project managers, controllers, and administrators can increase planned hours or deactivate the protection.
Combine with daily limit
Via Overbooking stop per day, you additionally set a daily upper limit that takes effect independently of the overall plan. This prevents employees from booking the entire remaining plan budget on one day after a longer break.
Example: A project has 30 remaining planned hours, the daily limit is set to 8 hours. A person has not yet booked on the project and wants to enter a 10-hour day. ZEP only accepts the first 8 hours; for the remaining 2 hours, another solution must be chosen, for example distributing them to the following day.
Escalation email to project managers
The escalation email contains the project name, the current planned and actual hours at the time of triggering, and the triggered threshold. Project managers can thus assess how critical the situation is without clicking into ZEP and react in a targeted manner — for example by increasing the plan after agreement with the customer, pausing further bookings, or initiating a follow-up order.