When you have planned work but aren’t sure who will be completing it yet, you can use placeholders. Placeholders can be assigned to projects just like people. You can assign time to a placeholder when you’re unsure who will be working on a project, or if your team is already too busy. You can then reassign that time to a specific person later.

Adding placeholders

Placeholders can be added in two ways:

• From Schedule > Team, click the + Add placeholder button at the bottom of the page.
• From Manage > Placeholders, click +Add placeholder.

Suggestions for setting up placeholders

Typically, a placeholder aligns with certain roles you regularly need on your projects. For example, if you often need designers on projects, you could name a placeholder “Designer.”

Assigning roles to placeholders can also be helpful. For example, the Designer placeholder could also be assigned the Designer role. Then, if you filter your Team schedule to see everyone with the Designer role, you’ll see the placeholder along with your other designer teammates.

Using placeholders

Assigning time to a placeholder

You can assign time to a placeholder the same way you assign time to people. However, there are a few things to note:

• When assigning time from the Assign person dropdown, placeholders will appear at the bottom of the list, below your team.
• On the Team schedule, placeholders are always grouped above your team.
• When viewing your Projects schedule, assignments for placeholders have yellow bars on them (indicating that the work is tentative), so they’re easy to spot.
• You cannot assign Time Off to placeholders.
• You have a limited number of placeholders in your account.

Reassigning placeholder time to a person

When you know who should be scheduled to an assignment that’s held by a placeholder, you can move the scheduled time to that person.

1. Head to Schedule > Projects
2. Click into the placeholder assignment.
3. From the edit assignment form, click the Person dropdown and select the person you’d like to move the placeholder assignment to.
4. Click Update on the form and the assignment will be moved.

Archiving, deleting, and restoring placeholders

Archiving placeholders

Archiving a placeholder will remove it from your schedule and place it on the archived placeholders page. All data remains intact, and you can restore the placeholder at any time.

Once a placeholder is archived, their assignments can no longer be edited. You’ll need to restore the placeholder in order to edit the assignments again. Before archiving the placeholder, you may want to delete any of its future scheduled assignments or reassign them to people in your account.

To archive a placeholder:

1. Head to Schedule > Team.
2. Click the downward-pointing Expand arrow that appears to the right of a placeholder’s name. If the arrow points up, you’ve already expanded your view and can skip this step.
3. Click the Actions menu and select Archive.

Restoring placeholders

To restore an archived placeholder:

1. Go to Manage > Placeholders.
2. Click the View archived placeholders button.
3. Click Restore next to the archived placeholder’s name.

They will be moved back to your list of active placeholders.

Deleting placeholders

If you’d like to permanently remove a placeholder and all of its data from your account, you can delete it. Deleting is irreversible—it will erase the placeholder and all of its scheduled time, and the data can’t be recovered.

To delete a placeholder:

1. Head to Schedule > Team.
2. Click the downward-pointing Expand arrow that appears to the right of a placeholder’s name. If the arrow points up, you’ve already expanded your view and can skip this step.
3. Click the Actions menu and select Delete.
4. Type DELETE to confirm, and click Delete.

Note: You can also archive and delete placeholders from Manage > Placeholders.