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. The model’s Timeline view reads the same dates as people instead of totals: who starts on which day, and whose last day is when — see Analyse a model.

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 point in an ordered series — successive states of the same organization. Most points are plans you author; a snapshot of a model can be a point too, if you place it on the timeline.

Once models share a timeline, a strip along the top of the model views lets you move between its points, and the analysis views gain a column per point: headcount and cost side by side across every state you’ve planned, with each column clickable through to the model behind it. The two axes compose: within each point’s column, only the positions whose own dates are in effect on that point’s date are counted, so a role dated to open after a point doesn’t inflate it. Copying a model or merging one into another keeps every position’s dates, and Compare treats a change of dates as a real difference.

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 points

Because Resorcerer can follow a position from one point 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 people rather than positions, the model’s Timeline view lists who joined and who left at each point — see Analyse a model.

For the full story of a single position, open its details and switch to the Timeline tab: every point on the timeline is listed in order, showing whether the position exists there, its start and end dates at that point, and what changed at each step — and each entry jumps straight to that point’s model. Hovering any date badge spells out what it means, and a position whose window has already ended or not yet begun is marked as such.

Snapshots on the timeline

A snapshot is a read-only copy of a model taken at a moment — before a sync proposal is applied, on a schedule, or whenever you press Snapshot now. Snapshots live on the model’s Snapshots tab, and each one is either on the model’s timeline or off it. One you place there is a point like any other, filed under its effective date and marked with a camera icon on the strip; one you leave off stays in the model’s history without adding a point. Scheduled snapshots stay off the timeline unless you ask, so a daily schedule doesn’t crowd it.

See Snapshots for how they are taken and dated, how to move one on or off the timeline, and automatic snapshots.

Using both together

The two axes compose. A point dated end of Q2 can perfectly well contain a contractor whose position expires in August — the point says what you planned, the dates say what’s live within it. In the trend views, the points 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 history along the timeline is worked out from the models themselves.

Models — effective dates, and the models a timeline is built from.
Snapshots — read-only copies of a model, on the timeline or off it.
Units and slots — where position dates are set.
Analyse a model — the trend and pivot views these dates feed.