This guide walks Project Managers through the full project planning workflow from drafting a project and staffing it with the right people, to setting a budget, going live, and tracking performance as work unfolds.
It reflects how high-performing teams use Float in practice by connecting three key elements into one continuous system: commercial intent (your estimate), planned work (the schedule), and actuals (tracked time).
⚠️ Don't see a feature mentioned in this guide?
This is likely due to your current access rights. To follow this guide fully, you must have Admin access or be a Manager with all permissions enabled. Without this level of access, some features may be hidden or unavailable to you.
If you need your access updated, please contact your team's Account Owner or one of the Admins.
Check capacity before you plan
The Schedule is your main source of truth for team availability. While individual team members use it to check their own work, Project Managers use it to quickly assess capacity across the team.
Before creating a new project, spend a few minutes on the Schedule to understand what headroom your team actually has. This prevents over-committing people who are already near full utilization.
To ensure capacity is accurately reflected on the Schedule, you should:
Once this information is configured, the Schedule provides a complete view of:
Utilization – how much of a person’s time is allocated (scheduled).
Remaining capacity – hours still available to schedule (unscheduled).
Overtime – when someone is scheduled beyond their capacity.
To assess capacity across your team, use date range insights:
Set a time range you want to focus on.
Use sorting options:
- Unscheduled (High → Low) to find people with the most availability.
- Unscheduled (Low → High) to identify the busiest or overbooked team members.To narrow your search, apply filters of role, department, or tags.
Manage overtime
Anything that has been scheduled above the team member’s capacity is automatically highlighted - their schedule background and their date range insight number turn red. It’s a good practice to review overtime trends over longer periods (e.g., quarterly) to support hiring decisions or contractor requests with real data.
Draft a project
The Projects page is your central hub for managing your project pipeline. It lists all active and archived projects and can be sorted by name, project code, client, stage, margin, budget, start/end dates, and owner. This view is especially useful for tracking projects across different stages and statuses, giving you a clear, sortable overview of ongoing and incoming work.
From here, you can add a new project, create and manage project templates, and import or export your project list.
All active projects automatically appear on the Project plan page, which provides an overview of scheduled work and team allocations. This is where most Project Managers begin shaping the project work.
Depending on your team’s setup, you can either start a new project from scratch or use project templates. Templates help standardize workflows and save time. Most PMs use them to plan and schedule repeatable work with predefined phases, tasks, milestones, budgets, and team members. If you need an exact copy of an existing project, including its phases and allocations, you can use the duplicate feature.
To start scoping a new project, click the + button > Add project or use one of the existing templates.
When drafting a project, it’s important to use stages intentionally. If the project is still being scoped internally, keep it in the Draft stage. This allows you to experiment with different timelines and staffing scenarios without the project being visible to the wider team. If the project is scoped but is still awaiting client confirmation, you might move it to Tentative. Keeping projects in these early stages helps avoid confusion and unnecessary notifications.
Structure the work
In the project settings, you can enter any known project details, such as the client, dates, and any other relevant information.
For complex projects, it is also a good practice to structure the work and its delivery. This typically involves breaking the project down into phases and tasks and setting up milestones. This structure gives clarity to both planning and reporting. It also makes it easier to allocate time accurately and track progress later.
Set the budget to estimate profitability
Budgets define how the project will be measured financially and help you understand whether the plan is viable.
Float supports different budget types depending on how your project is structured:
Time & materials is best suited to ongoing or flexible work, where revenue is based on actual billable time.
Fixed fee is more appropriate for defined-scope projects, where you’re working against an agreed price.
Fixed hours is often used for internal or capacity-limited work, where the focus is on tracking time against a set limit.
To provide a real-time view of project performance based on scheduled or logged work, Float considers project budgets, the cost and bill rates, and project expenses (if any). To get the most detailed insights into profitability, ensure your team has both cost rates and bill rates set.
As you plan and schedule work, Float continuously updates budget utilization and profitability metrics:
Budget usage – how much of the budget is still remaining.
Costs and billable revenue – based on your team’s rates.
Margin – the difference between revenue and cost, shown as a percentage.
Margin helps you understand how profitable a project is. A higher margin means the project is generating more revenue than its cost, while a lower (or negative) margin may indicate the project is overserviced or underpriced.
Because this data updates in real time, you can evaluate profitability early and adjust scope, resourcing, or timelines before the project begins.
Staff the project
In the Team section, you can add everyone who'll be working on the project. Float gives you two ways to add people to a project — by role (when you don’t yet know who will do the work) or by person (when you are ready to assign specific people). You can mix both approaches within the same project.
When scoping, you can start by adding roles to the project. This allows you to define the type of work needed without committing to specific people too early. It keeps your plan flexible and aligned with real capacity.
As your plan becomes more defined, you can replace roles with named team members. Float’s smart assign feature helps with this by suggesting the best matches based on role fit and availability.
Allocate time
Once your team is defined, you can begin allocating time. Opening the project view allows you to focus on a single project and quickly add allocations in a way that fits your planning style. Simply click a specific date to create day-level allocation, or click and drag across several days to create longer time blocks, such as weeks, months, or quarters. You can plan in hours or as a percentage of a person’s capacity, and easily modify the planned work as things evolve. To adjust allocations:
Drag the edges to extend or shorten the timeframe.
Click to open the allocation menu and update hours, capacity percentage, or assignment details.
Grab and drag allocations to reschedule work as plans change.
Before moving forward, it’s worth reviewing the plan for any conflicts. Checking other allocations and overtime helps ensure your plan is realistic and no one is overbooked.
Set your baseline
Once your project is structured, staffed, and budgeted, you can save an estimate. It captures what you expect the project to require in terms of time, cost, and resourcing, based on your current plan.
As work progresses, this baseline becomes your point of comparison. You’ll be able to see how scheduled and logged time tracks against the original plan, helping you understand performance and profitability.
If the scope changes, avoid editing the original estimate. Instead, save a new version. This creates a clear record of how the project evolved and supports better internal and client conversations. In many teams, this estimate effectively represents the SOW (statement of work), with earlier versions acting as drafts and the final version reflecting what was agreed.
Set the project live
Once the project has been approved, change its stage to Confirmed. This makes the project visible across the team, enables time tracking, and notifies people of any changes to their scheduled work.
Even after the project is live, you can continue to adjust the plan as needed.
Track time
Time tracking completes the workflow by capturing what actually happened. This step is essential because it connects the plan to real execution. It shows how work actually unfolded and provides the data needed for meaningful reporting.
Depending on your setup:
Your team can log time manually on the Log time page,
You can log time on their behalf on the Log team page,
Or you can enable auto-logging so that the scheduled time is recorded automatically.
Monitor performance
As the project progresses, you can use the Single Project Report to track its performance.
This is where the full value of the workflow becomes clear—bringing together what was planned, what was scheduled, and what actually happened.
With this report, you can:
Visualize report data for an entire project, project-to-date, or any specific timeframe.
Monitor budget utilization and track profitability metrics.
Compare the project’s baseline estimate with scheduled or logged data.
Drill down on each project phase, task, and team.
Track project expenses
Track logged hours
Export chart or table data.
Manage changes as the project runs
Projects rarely go exactly to plan, so it’s important to adjust as you go.
If timelines shift, you can move the entire project or a part of it in one step using the shift timeline feature. If resourcing needs change, you can add or swap team members directly from the project view and use smart assign to find the best available fit. If the entire plan changes, you want the project stage to reflect it.