Planning overview
What SmartERP Planning is for, who uses it, what the nine Planning modules add, and how they fit with the rest of SmartERP.
SmartERP Planning lets you decide who works when. You plan shifts for employees and for equipment, publish them, and let employees see their schedule, take open shifts and give shifts back. This page is for everyone who will use or set up Planning. It applies to SmartERP Planning 17.0.3 and its bridge modules (17.0.1 and 17.0.2).
What Planning does#
- Plans people and materials on one schedule. A shift belongs to a resource, which is an employee or a piece of equipment such as a vehicle or a room. Both share the same schedule and the same rules.
- Works out allocated time for you. Allocated time comes from the resource's working calendar, so approved time off and public holidays are respected without extra work. See Concepts.
- Keeps a draft until you are ready. Shifts are drafts that only planners see. When you publish, employees see them and are told.
- Covers open shifts. A shift with nobody assigned is an open shift. You can fill it by hand, with Auto Plan, by email broadcast, or by letting employees take it.
- Lets employees help themselves. Employees take open shifts, give up a shift or ask a colleague to take it, from the application or from a personal link with no login.
- Shows workload. The schedule shows hours planned against hours available for every person and day, warns about double bookings and wrong roles, and a Utilisation report and a Dashboard summarise the week.
- Connects to the rest of SmartERP. Bridge modules link shifts to time off, contracts, skills, attendance, projects, sales orders and timesheets.
Who uses it#
| Audience | What they do | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| Planner (Planning Administrator) | Creates, assigns, publishes and changes shifts; sets up roles, templates and settings. | Quick start |
| Project manager | Plans the shifts of the projects they manage, from a task or from the schedule. | Plan project tasks |
| Employee | Sees their published shifts, takes open shifts, gives a shift back or asks to switch. | Take an open shift |
| Employee without a login | Uses a personal link from an email. | Portal guide |
| HR officer, attendance officer, timesheet approver | Read utilisation, planned against attended time, and unconfirmed timesheets. | Reports and dashboards |
| Administrator | Installs the modules, grants access, sets company options. | Configuration, Roles and permissions |
| Developer | Extends the data model, security and schedule. | Technical architecture |
What is included#
Planning is one application and eight optional bridge modules. A bridge module installs by itself when both Planning and the application it connects to are installed. You do not choose bridge modules one by one in normal use.
| Module (name in Apps) | Technical name | Version | Connects Planning to | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SmartERP Planning | smarterp_planning | 17.0.3.0.0 | Employees, Resource, Mail, Portal, Digest, web_timeline | Shifts, roles, templates, recurrence, open shifts, Auto Plan, publishing, self-service, schedule, dashboard, utilisation, portal pages. |
| SmartERP Planning - Time Off | smarterp_planning_holidays | 17.0.1.0.0 | Time Off | Warning on shifts that clash with approved or pending time off; "On Time Off" filter; a note on each affected shift when time off is approved. |
| SmartERP Planning - Contracts | smarterp_planning_contract | 17.0.1.0.0 | Employee Contracts | Warning on shifts outside the employee's contract; "Outside Contract" filter; contract checks when shifts are dragged, taken or broadcast. |
| SmartERP Planning - Skills | smarterp_planning_skills | 17.0.1.0.0 | Employee skills | Skills required by shifts and templates; only people with the skills are chosen or can take the shift. |
| SmartERP Planning - Attendances | smarterp_planning_attendance | 17.0.1.0.0 | Attendances | Check-in and check-out against the shift; lateness, early leave, no-shows; "Planned vs Attended" report; optional alert on a missed start. |
| SmartERP Planning - Project | smarterp_planning_project | 17.0.2.0.0 | Project | Project and task on shifts; Schedule by Project; planned, open and remaining hours on tasks; project managers plan their own projects. |
| SmartERP Planning - Sales | smarterp_planning_sale | 17.0.2.0.0 | Sales | Plannable services; open shifts created when an order is confirmed; Plan Orders; Schedule by Sales Order. |
| SmartERP Planning - Timesheets | smarterp_planning_timesheet | 17.0.2.0.0 | Timesheets (and the Project bridge) | Effective hours, variance and actual cost on shifts; optional draft timesheets proposed from finished shifts. |
| SmartERP Planning - SMS | smarterp_planning_sms | 17.0.1.0.0 | SMS | Shift reminders by SMS as well as email. |
All nine modules were installed on the system used to check this documentation, so every screen described here was seen running. Where a bridge is not installed on your system, its menus, fields and buttons are simply absent; the rest of Planning works as described. Each bridge has its own task page: Plan around time off, Plan within contracts, Require skills, Compare shifts with attendance, Plan project tasks, Plan sold services, Track time worked and Send shift reminders.
What Planning does not do#
- It does not calculate pay. The cost of a shift is its allocated hours multiplied by the Hourly Cost of its role. Planning has no hourly cost per employee and no overtime premium, so it shows overtime hours but never an overtime cost.
- It does not approve who takes an open shift. The first eligible employee to accept gets it. Approval exists only for changes to shifts that are already published (see Approve changes to published shifts).
- It does not swap two employees' shifts in one step. An employee asks for a switch, the shift stays theirs, and another eligible employee can take it over. If your company lets employees give shifts back, that option replaces switch requests.
- Forecasts are not shifts. A forecast books a share of someone's time for capacity and project figures. It is never published, emailed, offered for self-service or counted as a conflict, and the form does not offer Repeat for it.
- It does not read or write Odoo Enterprise Planning data. Its models are named
smarterp.planning.*so that they never collide with theplanning.*models of Odoo Enterprise, which would share the same tables if Enterprise were ever installed. - It does not stop double bookings. An overlap is flagged on the schedule and on the shift, not blocked. The same holds for a wrong role. See Resolve shift warnings.
Known issues in this release#
These were found while checking this documentation against a running system. Each has a page that explains the workaround.
- On the schedule by resource, the Open Shifts row can look empty. See Troubleshooting.
- Project managers who are not Planning Administrators see a Publish button that ends in an access error. See Troubleshooting.
- Where the Website application is installed, the personal schedule links fail with "Internal Server Error". See Troubleshooting.
- Costs are hidden in the screens but not protected in the data layer. See the Security reference.
How it fits with other SmartERP modules#
Planning reads and writes through the resource model that Employees already use, so every employee is planned through the resource behind their employee record. Working time, public holidays and time off come from the resource calendar. Approved time off reaches Planning without the Time Off bridge, because Odoo turns approved leave into calendar leaves; the bridge adds the warnings and also looks at requests that are still pending. See Integrations for the full list.
Where to go next#
- Concepts: the words and rules, with worked examples.
- Quick start: publish your first shift in about fifteen minutes.
- The task pages, in the order of the sidebar.
- Troubleshooting when a message or a screen is not what you expect.