Introducing the Planner: See Your Whole Team's Week at a Glance

If you've ever stared at a wall calendar trying to work out whether Dave's got room for another job on Thursday, or double-booked an engineer because two jobs looked fine in isolation but clashed the moment you zoomed out — the Planner is built for exactly that moment.

The problem with planning by job

Most scheduling tools, Opscel included until now, are built around a simple question: what's happening on a given day? You open the calendar, pick a date, and see the jobs booked in. That's genuinely useful — right up until the question you're actually asking is different: is my team full this week, and who's got room for this new job?

Those are not the same question, and answering the second one from a day-by-day calendar means clicking through five days, mentally stacking up each engineer's workload, and hoping you didn't lose count. It's slow, and it's exactly the kind of admin that eats an evening you didn't plan to spend on it.

What the Planner actually does

The Planner flips the axis. Instead of date × job, it's engineer × day — every engineer gets a row, every day of the week gets a column, and you see everyone's week on one board at once. Anything that hasn't been booked to a day yet sits in a backlog rail underneath, waiting to be dragged into place.

Booking a job is now a drag, not a form. Pull a card out of the backlog, drop it onto the engineer and day you want, and the Planner asks for a start time and duration before it saves. Need to move something because a job overran or a customer rescheduled? Drag the card to a new day. That's the whole interaction.

Built to stop you double-booking, not just to look tidy

The genuinely useful part isn't the drag-and-drop — plenty of tools have that. It's what the Planner refuses to let you do. You can't silently overlap two visits on the same engineer without the system making that visible. You can't create a job from the Planner itself — every card on the board has to already exist as a real job, which means the Planner can't become a second, disconnected place where phantom work gets scheduled and never makes it into your actual job records. If the board looks empty for a new job, that's the system correctly telling you to raise it in Jobs first, not a bug.

That constraint is deliberate. A scheduling board that lets you conjure jobs into existence on the fly is a board that quietly drifts out of sync with everything else — your quotes, your invoicing, your customer records. The Planner stays anchored to the same job data as the rest of Opscel, so what you see on the board is what's actually happening, not a parallel version of it.

Who this is for

The Planner sits under Operations, and it's built for whoever's actually doing the scheduling — Super Admins, Admins, Contract Managers, and Site Managers. Engineers themselves don't see it; they're taken straight to the field app, where the visits that land on the Planner show up as their day's work. So the split is clean: the office plans the week, the field executes it, and both are looking at the same underlying jobs.

If you're a sole trader or a very small team, you may find the existing Jobs calendar covers what you need day to day. The Planner earns its keep once you're coordinating several engineers at once and "is anyone free?" becomes a question you're answering more than once a day.

Try it

The Planner is live now under Operations → Planner. If you're already scheduling jobs in Opscel, your existing jobs will show up in the backlog the first time you open it — there's nothing to migrate. Full walkthrough of reading the board, booking from the backlog, and moving visits is in the Planner documentation.

If you're new to Opscel and want to see how the Planner fits alongside quoting, certificates, and invoicing, take a look at Jobs & Scheduling or the Field Service App your engineers use to receive the work you book.