You can use the Spread Hours option in the Project Planner to distribute allocated or unscheduled hours evenly across upcoming periods (weeks or months). This feature helps maintain workload balance, improve forecast accuracy, and avoid the need for manual schedule adjustments.
Rules & Behavior
- Spreading hours begins after the current period and by default continues until the allocation end date, but you can adjust this window manually.
- CORE protects active periods by preserving existing work and prevents overwriting them.
- The Spread Hours option is disabled if there are no unscheduled hours.
- Spreading cannot proceed if the End Date field is blank.
- A warning is shown if the spread window extends beyond the allocation’s end date.
- Periods already containing time entries are locked and are excluded from spreading.
- Any allocation schedule that has been manually edited is excluded from future automatic spreading.
- The process respects the minimum time entry increment setting (e.g., 0.25 = 15 minutes), so all distributions will align to that increment.
Examples
Allocations without an end date: You are required to specify an end date before spreading.
Active period mid-week or mid-month: Spreading skips the current partial period and starts from the next full period to avoid interfering with in-progress work.
- Unscheduled hours redistribution: If 160 hours are allocated over four months and only 80 are scheduled, you can spread the remaining 80 evenly across the future months.
- Full reallocation: If you want to rebalance entirely, choose to spread all allocated hours and redistribute the full total across the timeline.
- Weekly view with active week: If today is Wednesday, spreading for a weekly schedule will begin from the following week to avoid overriding Monday through Wednesday.