Spreadsheets break at the third project

Why the third project is the breaking point

With one project, your sheet is a list of names and hours. With two, you copy the tab and keep an eye on the people who appear in both.

At three, the overlap becomes your whole problem. A developer on 20 hours in one tab, 16 in another and 10 in a third is booked for 46 hours. No tab shows you that number, so nobody sees it until she says so.

Adding a summary tab helps for a week. Then someone inserts a row, a formula points at the wrong cell, and your total is quietly wrong.

Leave lives somewhere else

Your sheet knows who is planned. It doesn't know who is away. Approved leave sits in an HR tool or an email thread, and somebody has to copy it across by hand.

Miss one copy and your plan for next Thursday shows eight hours for a person on holiday. You were planning a week that was wrong before it started.

Nobody can tell who changed what

A shared sheet keeps a version history, but it can't tell you why a number moved. When a project's hours drop from 30 to 12, you want the old value, the new value and the name of the person who changed it.

Timesheets make it harder. People log hours in one sheet, planners read another, and the two never quite agree. By month end you're reconciling copies instead of reading a report.

What one capacity grid changes

PeopleMuster puts every person against every day of the month. You get planned hours in each cell and a monthly total per person. Bands mark each day as under, partial, full or over, following your expected working day.

Group the grid by people to see who is stretched. Group it by projects to see which client is absorbing the team. A billable filter sets client work apart from internal time.

Your approved leave shows as L and company holidays as H, straight from the same database. Your team logs hours per project in the daily recap, managers approve them, and the utilisation report reads those same entries.

PeopleMuster's activity log records each change with its old and new value, who made it and when. You can filter it by user, by project or by creates, updates and deletes.

What a planning tool costs next to a sheet

Your spreadsheet feels free, which is why it lasts so long. A dedicated resource planner is the usual next step, and it has a price per person.

Float Starter is $7 per scheduled person per month. Runn Lite is $7 per resource seat per month on annual billing, with a 20-seat minimum. Both figures come from the vendors' own pricing pages in September 2026.

PeopleMuster is $3 per person per month, with no seat minimum and every module included. You get the capacity grid, timesheets and leave, plus the HR records underneath them. Annual billing is $30 per person per year.

Signs your sheet has already broken

Check your own sheet against these. Two or more means your third project has arrived.

• Someone keeps a private copy because the shared one is wrong.
• A person's weekly total lives only in a manager's head.
• Leave reaches the plan a few days after it's approved.
• Nobody can say who changed last week's numbers.
• Month end starts with reconciling two sheets.