Unassigned roles allow you to estimate, scope, and plan projects even when you don’t yet know which team members will complete the work. By planning with roles instead of specific people, you can forecast project costs, margins, and hiring needs more accurately.

Unassigned roles act as role-based placeholders in your project plan. You can allocate time to these roles during planning and assign the actual team members later when the project is confirmed or resources become available.

When scoping a new project, you may know the types of roles needed and the timeline, but not yet the exact people who will work on it. For example:

During the planning phase, you can add these as unassigned roles in your project. If the project is approved, you can later assign real team members to those roles. This allows you to create realistic estimates and timelines without waiting for resource assignments.

In some situations, you know which role will be needed but not the exact person. For example:

Adding an unassigned role allows you to reserve capacity in your plan until the right person becomes available.

Planning only part of a project can lead to misleading profit margins. Example:

Because the second month’s work is not included:

Using unassigned roles allows you to plan the full scope of work, even if team members have not been assigned yet.

Unassigned roles can be described as role-based placeholders used for project planning.

They differ from person-type placeholders that are used for headcount planning.

All available roles are displayed with their cost and bill rates (if set).

If the role does not have role rates set, the Account Owner or one of the team Admins can add them in Team settings > Roles & rates.

📝Note: Some of the roles might be greyed out. For a role to be active for planning, it must be assigned to at least one person on your team.

You can add unassigned roles to specific project phases only by adding them to the phase's Team section. If your project’s budget is fee-based, this is also where you can specify different bill rates that will be applied to that phase only. Those will apply as you allocate time for the corresponding phase/s.

​Roles added on the phase level will automatically show in the project's Team section with the phase indicator.

Once a role is added to the project or phase’s team, you can assign it to an actual person at any time with the +Assign button.

By default, Float's Smart assign feature shows the recommended people first. The recommendations are based on role alignment and availability during the required timeframe.

​Each recommendation includes:

Role match options:

Availability match option:

You are not limited to the suggested options. While Smart assign prioritizes strong role and availability matches, you can still assign someone who was not recommended. You can scroll through the full person list, select anyone manually, and override the recommendations whenever needed.

If a selected person has different bill rates than the role, you can choose which rate to use:

Once a person is assigned, all existing allocations scheduled for the unassigned role are automatically transferred to that person.

If any of your projects have some unassigned roles, you can quickly identify them using the Person type filter, selecting Unassigned role.

​You can also add a Role filter to narrow your search.

To streamline planning, create project templates with unassigned roles instead of specific people. When starting a new project, use the template to quickly assign people to matching roles.

On the reports, you can use the People: Unassigned filter to include/exclude unassigned roles.

The People tab of the People report shows the allocation for all the unassigned roles grouped by role. Under each unassigned role, the list of projects is displayed. 

On the Single Project Report, allocations scheduled for the unassigned roles are summarized by role in the Team tab.

If the time is allocated for a specific task, the unassigned role allocations will also show in the Tasks tab.
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The Account Owner and the Admins can see an overview of all the roles on the Roles & rates page within the Team settings. This is where roles can be added, edited, or deleted.
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In the Unassigned column, we display the number of projects with unassigned roles.

​Clicking on the number opens the Project plan with the role and unassigned role filers applied.