Planning over time

Organizations change, and a plan that can’t express when isn’t much of a plan. Resorcerer gives you two independent ways to put structure on a calendar. They work on their own or together, and it’s worth knowing which question each one answers.

	Answers	Where you set it
Dates on a position	“When does this position start and end?”	Start and end date on a slot.
A timeline of models	“What did the whole organization look like at each point we planned for?”	Effective date on a model, plus a timeline linking them.

You can use neither, either, or both.

Dates on a position

A slot can carry a start date, an end date, or both. That’s how you say a role opens in March, or a contractor rolls off at the end of Q3, without building a separate model for it.

Dated and undated positions live happily in the same model — a slot with no dates is simply always active. The only rule is the obvious one: an end date can’t come before its start date.

Where these dates pay off is in the analysis views. The Counts and Costs views can plot a trend, and dated positions make that trend real: headcount and cost rise and fall as positions come into and out of effect, so you can see the shape of a year’s plan rather than a single total. You can plot at each change or at a regular monthly interval.

A timeline of models

The second axis works at the level of whole models. Give a model an effective date and add it to a timeline, and it becomes one snapshot in an ordered series — successive states of the same organization.

Once models share a timeline, a strip along the top of the model views lets you move between snapshots, and the analysis views gain a column per snapshot: headcount and cost side by side across every state you’ve planned, with each column clickable through to the model behind it.

This is the axis for scenario planning at a coarse grain — today, end of Q2, end of year — where each point is a fully worked-out structure rather than a date on a single position.

What changed between snapshots

Because Resorcerer can follow a position from one snapshot to the next, it also reports each position’s history along the timeline: when it first appeared, when it was removed, and whether its attributes changed on the way. Those show up as badges on the slot, so you can see at a glance which parts of a structure are new, which are going away, and which have quietly been re-levelled.

For the full story of a single position, open its details and switch to the Timeline tab: every snapshot in the timeline is listed in order, showing whether the position exists there and what changed at each step — and each entry jumps straight to that snapshot.

Using both together

The two axes compose. A snapshot dated end of Q2 can perfectly well contain a contractor whose position expires in August — the snapshot says what you planned, the dates say what’s live within it. In the trend views, the snapshots supply the columns and the position dates decide which positions count in each one.

Nothing forces you to choose, and neither axis is derived from the other: the dates you author on a position are yours, and the snapshot history is worked out from the models themselves.

Related

• Models — effective dates, and the models a timeline is built from.
• Units and slots — where position dates are set.
• Analyse a model — the trend and pivot views these dates feed.