Planning16 June 20264 min read
Monday morning, quarter past eight. Two sick notes in a team of six. The question that follows is never "how many hours are we down" — that is quickly calculated. The question is: which work was sitting with those two this week, what genuinely has to be finished, and who can take it over without something else falling over.
At a firm where the planning lives in a spreadsheet, answering that takes a morning. At a firm where work is planned per employee and per week, it takes fifteen minutes.
In a team of twenty, one absent colleague is about five percent of capacity. In a team of six it is seventeen percent, in a week that was probably already ninety percent booked. There is no buffer to absorb it; the work has to go somewhere else.
On top of that, knowledge in a small team is tied to people. The assignee on a file is often also the one who knows the client, knows which documents are still missing and why the previous return deviated. Handing work over therefore means handing context over — and that context is rarely written down anywhere.
Redistribution only works when three things are visible at the same time.
What was planned. Not "Anouk does the VAT", but per client which activity is open this period, what status it is in and how many hours were set against it. Without that level of detail, the only form of handover is a conversation.
Who has room. Planned hours per employee set against available hours for that week — contract hours minus leave and absence. Only then is it clear whether someone can genuinely take on four more hours or was already over their week.
What can wait. Not everything planned for this week has to be finished this week. A year-end file with an internal milestone in September is a different matter from a return with a statutory date. That distinction has to come from the planning itself, not from someone's memory.
The whole exercise turns on one thing: that the planning is still correct afterwards. A redistribution that only exists in two people's heads is gone again the following week.
Illness cannot be planned; holidays can — and yet summer causes the same imbalance at many firms. That happens because leave and work distribution live in different systems: leave in an HR overview, planning in a spreadsheet. Putting them side by side shows in May which weeks in July are too full.
In Offsoo, leave, absence and overtime sit with time tracking, and planned hours sit in the planning grid. The difference between available and planned can therefore be read per month or per week, well before the week in question starts.
Two things are worth reviewing after a busy period.
The ratio between planned and recorded hours shows whether the estimate held. If an activity structurally takes more time than it is given, that is not an incident but a planning error repeating itself every period.
Structural overbooking becomes visible as soon as several periods sit side by side. An employee above their available hours in four months out of six has not been unlucky with absence — there is simply too much work there.
This is not automatic redistribution. Offsoo does not move tasks by itself and does not decide which file can wait; that judgement stays with the firm. What it does do is put the three things needed for it in one place: what is open, who has room, and how many hours stand against it.
What changes most is the pace. A sick note on Monday morning stays inconvenient, but it costs fifteen minutes instead of a morning, and the chance of a file falling through the cracks gets considerably smaller.
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