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The Benefits of Planning

Planning in the Grid

Unanet offers several ways to plan resources on projects; this lesson focuses on the
grid planner. The grid planner is an Excel-like tool for selecting resources on projects
and associating those resources with cost and bill amounts. Reports can be run against
planned resources to view total costs and bill amounts. Unanet users can use the grid
planner for bid and proposal work, budgeting, and project forecasting.

Grid planners are available directly within a project’s menu, where users may be
planned on a single project. While this menu provides increased insight for features like
multiple plan sets, it does limit the ability to plan or budget users to multiple projects.
There is also the People Planner, a grid planner available through the Forecast menu
that allows project planning for many users or expense planning on many projects at the
same time. This type of grid provides increased visibility not typically available on a
single project.

Using Grids to Create a Project Plan
Project plans can be created for both people (labor) and expenses (materials and/or
items). While an individual plan can be created, the grid allows for many planning

increments to be created at the same time.

The single most important concept to understand about planning (or assigning)
resources or expenses is the increment used to create the plan. Plans (and
assignments) can only be edited in the exact same increment as when they were
created. As such, a monthly plan can only be edited in the future if a grid is created
using a monthly period when creating a grid for editing purposes.

Reporting on plans (or assignments) can be displayed in many
increments, regardless of the increment used to create the plan (or
assignment).

LESSON 2: PLANNING LABOR AND EXPENSES
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