Planned Effort

Planned effort sits at the intersection of a Task and a Project Member. In the data model this is an Employee Usage record; the UI presents it as “Planned Effort” when you open a task’s assignments.

Fields at a glance

Field	What it stores
Project Member	The employee assigned to this task (via their project membership)
Task	The task this planned effort belongs to
Estimated Effort	The total planned hours for this person on this task
Cadence	How the effort is spread across the task’s duration: throughout, once, or periodic
Quantity	How many units of this assignment are needed (defaults to 1)

Estimated Effort is a planning input — it does not change automatically as work is logged. Comparing it against actual work happens through utilization and workload views, which combine planned effort with bookings and logged time.

Cadence: how the effort is spread out

The Cadence setting controls when the planned hours are expected to happen within the task:

Cadence	Meaning
Throughout	The default — effort is spread evenly across the whole task duration
Once	A single block of work, anchored at the start or the end of the task
Periodic	A repeating block of hours, every N days or weeks (e.g. “4 hours every 2 weeks”)

For Once and Periodic cadence, an additional block length (in hours) defines how long each occurrence runs. GreenVee warns if a periodic block is longer than the working hours available in one period.

For Team Leads

Planned Effort is the field you tune when sizing work. Set the estimated effort before a task starts, and pick a cadence that matches how the work actually happens — spread out, a single push, or recurring. Revisit when scope changes.

Relationship to bookings

An Employee Usage record can be linked to an Employee Booking. The booking reserves the calendar time; the Employee Usage record holds the effort estimate for the same work. Together they answer two different questions: when is this person working on this task (booking), and how much effort is involved (planned effort).

The equivalent for equipment is Equipment Usage, linked to Equipment Bookings — see Bookings for how these connect.

One record per person per task

Each Project Member gets one Employee Usage record per Task. If two people are assigned to the same task, there are two Employee Usage records — one per person. This means estimates are tracked individually, not pooled across the team.

Note

Employee Usage records are created at the task level. They require the person to already be a Project Member — added to the project with a role and rate. If a person does not appear in the planned-effort list for a task, check that they have been added to the project first.