Resource Planning Software: 6 Tools for Consultancies Compared

In consultancies, resource planning is the most expensive spreadsheet in the building. It decides whether an engagement can be staffed, whether someone is sitting on the bench and whether utilization holds up at quarter-end. In many firms it lives in an Excel file that is discussed once a week in the staffing meeting and is already out of date the next day.

Price pressure makes that expensive. According to the BDU (the German Association of Management Consultants), the average billed daily rate in consulting in Germany was €1,300 in 2025, two percent below the previous year. At the same time, revenue per head is falling: the Lünendonk list 2026 shows revenue growth of 4.1 percent for the German top 20, with declining output per head. If you want to hold your margin under these conditions, you steer via utilization.

Resource planning software brings planning together with the time actually booked. This comparison looks at six systems for consultancies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and the criteria that decide the choice.

What is economically at stake in planning

Resource planning has a direct effect on the figures of the current quarter:

• Margin: Every unstaffed consultant day is lost revenue while personnel costs stay the same.
• Utilization: Global billable utilization in professional services organizations was 66.4 percent in 2025, the lowest level ever recorded by SPI Research.
• Forecast: Without reliable staffing, the revenue forecast for the next quarter is a guess on demand.
• Project costs: Short-notice restaffing with more expensive profiles eats up the calculated project margin.
• Attrition: Permanent overload of individual seniors is the most reliable warning sign of resignations. Attrition in German management consulting was around twelve percent in 2025.

One point of utilization in euros

The calculation is the same in every firm. Ten consultants with around 200 available days a year make 2,000 capacity days. One percentage point of utilization equals 20 days. At a billed daily rate of €1,300, that is €26,000 in annual revenue per point. Moving from 68 to 73 percent brings in €130,000 without a single new hire.

This multiplier effect explains why choosing the software is a commercial decision. Utilization management in consulting belongs with management, not with the assistant.

What resource planning software must deliver

Utilization per consultant for the coming weeks

The central question is who will be free in eight weeks. A system that only reports backwards does not replace the planning spreadsheet. Check how far the planning horizon reaches, whether you can switch the view between days, weeks and months, and whether vacation, public holidays and absences are automatically deducted from available capacity. Without this deduction, the system plans against capacity that does not exist in the calendar.

Utilization per project

The opposite direction is just as important. Which project ties up how much capacity, and does the remaining budget support the planned staffing? Only when both views rest on the same data can you assess a restaffing without tearing a hole elsewhere. This becomes particularly critical in resource planning across parallel projects, when the same person is planned on three engagements and each engagement has booked them at 60 percent.

Overtime per team

Overload hides in individual commitments and rarely becomes visible in total. According to the IAB working time accounts (Institute for Employment Research), employees in Germany worked an average of 11.6 paid and 15.6 unpaid overtime hours in 2025. In consulting, this figure is concentrated on a few profiles. Check whether the system compares planned and actually booked hours and whether the deviation can be analyzed per team. A plain sum of planned hours only shows overload once it has long since happened.

Staffing by availability, rate and qualification

Staffing a role is a decision under several constraints: availability, hourly rate, experience, certification, sometimes willingness to travel. A system that only knows availability answers part of the question. Check which attributes can be stored for employees and filtered during staffing, and whether a tentative booking can be distinguished from a firm reservation. In the proposal phase, this difference is hard cash.

Bench view of free capacity

Unstaffed capacity costs money immediately. A bench view shows who is underbooked in the coming weeks, early enough for sales, internal projects or training. Without this view, idle time only shows up in the following month's utilization statistics, when the revenue is already lost. How to systematically extend the lead time to three to six weeks is explained in the article on bench management in consultancies.

Why Excel fails at this point

The spreadsheet is not the problem. The problem is the second set of data. Planning happens in Excel, booking in the time tracking system, billing in a third tool. Every discrepancy between these states has to be noticed by a person.

The figures on this tool break are clear. In 16 percent of German companies, working time recording alone runs on an Excel spreadsheet, as a representative Bitkom survey shows. 55 percent consider accurate time recording particularly hard to implement in knowledge work. According to a 2026 Civey survey, switching between too many tools and systems is the biggest time waster in daily work for 33 percent of respondents, and 36 percent lose more than an hour a day as a result.

Three effects occur particularly reliably in consultancies:

• The plan ages faster than it is maintained. Between two staffing meetings, a kick-off moves, an engagement is extended, someone calls in sick. The file shows Monday's status.
• Nobody holds plan against actuals. Someone who books 20 percent over plan for weeks signals a staffing problem. In separate systems, this only surfaces at project close.
• The bench stays invisible. Free capacity is not in any cell. It results from the difference, and in practice nobody recalculates differences every week.

The vendors compared

All information was collected from the vendors' websites on 21 October 2026. Prices are per user per month plus VAT.

Two notes for context. teamspace and projectfacts both come from 5 POINT AG; projectfacts is effectively the top teamspace edition. If you request quotes for both, you are comparing two variants of the same platform. And none of the five competitors publicly documents an overtime report per team. If you depend on it, ask to see it explicitly in the demo.

What each system stands for

ZEP has its roots in Project Time Tracking and puts planning on the same data your team books to anyway. Its strength lies in the two multi-views across all employees and all projects, and in bringing plan and actuals together in one report without export. Resource Planning is an add-on, so you can limit the investment to the people who are planned or plan themselves.

teamspace offers the most mature staffing logic in the field with its staffing plan and staffing wizard, including a competence scale and the distinction between tentative booking and firm reservation. The catch is the package structure: capacity planning is only available from the enterprise edition, and hosting is charged separately.

PLANTA comes from classic multi-project management and accordingly brings what-if simulations, skill matching and portfolio views. The system is aimed at firms with formalized project management, for example in engineering. For a consultancy with short engagements and frequent restaffing, the scope is more extensive than it is a good fit.

projectfacts sells all modules at a single price, which ends the package discussion. The capacity analysis answers utilization per person, per project and per team from one view. Since the price applies regardless of the functions used, the system pays off mainly for firms that actually use several modules.

awork is the leanest and fastest to roll out in this comparison, with a clear workload view and filters by skills and seniority. It lacks commercial depth: a dedicated utilization view per project is not documented, and the workload view only starts from the Standard plan.

Vertec covers the entire path from lead to invoice and, with its free capacity view and over- and undertime calculation, offers the most detailed individual analysis. However, the entry price is well above the field, because the base package and the resource planning module are combined. From around eleven users, the tiered pricing kicks in and narrows the gap.

Resource planning with ZEP

Resource Planning in ZEP is built as an add-on. It can be added to ZEP Track, ZEP Control and ZEP Operations for €5 per user per month and is included in ZEP Business. It is not available in ZEP Clock, because it requires a project context. The annual discount applies to the product line; the add-on itself is not affected.

The whole team and all projects, each in one view

Two overviews make the difference. The employee staffing view shows all employees one below the other on a timeline, each row with its utilization. Overplanning is marked red. Each row can be expanded down to individual projects, and you can filter by department, people, categories or by the criterion of showing only employees with capacity.

The project staffing view turns the perspective around. All projects one below the other, each row with planned hours, allocated and open hours and planned revenue. Expanded, the staffed people appear underneath. This view answers the question of which project is heading for a gap without any intermediate step.

On top of that come detail views for depth, one per person and one per project, as well as "My staffing" for all employees with their own projects and their own utilization.

Capacity is calculated automatically

100 percent equals the person's regular working time on that day. Public holidays, including half days, approved absences and days outside the employment period reduce capacity automatically. Requested absences that are not yet approved appear dashed and do not count yet. What a person can really deliver is therefore shown in the row itself.

You plan by dragging. A staffing entry is drawn in the row, moved via drag and drop, extended or changed in height, and saved automatically. In the form, you can staff several people or several projects at once, either with a value per day or a total for the period. If a new entry meets an existing one, a prompt lets you choose between adding up and replacing. Anyone who is replanned can receive a bundled notification if desired.

With the ZEP Assistant, the AI chat in ZEP, the same works in conversation. Sentences such as "Who in my department still has capacity in November?" or "Extend Jonas's staffing on Project Alpha until the end of the month" replace the route via the form.

Plan and actuals in one report

Two reports close the loop. The planned vs. actual comparison sets plan, actual, deviation and capacity side by side. Planned capacity utilization shows, per employee and per department, where the firm stands in the coming weeks. Both use the hours the team books anyway, without export and without a second user administration.

For firms with a works council, the permission design is relevant. The role and permission matrix distinguishes between employee, project and own staffing, and department heads see their own department. Data a role is not allowed to see is never delivered by the server in the first place. Absence reasons are only visible to those with the corresponding permission; everyone else sees the public short form.

What planning does not do today

Planning happens at project level. If you plan individual tasks, you use Work Items from ZEP Control upwards. Times of day, recurring entries and planning on non-working days are currently not supported, and Resource Planning is not designed for shift operations. There is no skill search within planning. For consultancies that staff roles via stored qualification profiles, this is the point where comparing with the other vendors is worthwhile.

An often underestimated point concerns internal effort. Sales, recruiting and training tie up capacity but do not appear in any project plan. How to map this effort cleanly without distorting the utilization rate is described in the article on resource planning for internal projects.

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Plan and reality belong in one report

The most common mistake when introducing resource planning is to run it as a pure planning tool. The result is a well-maintained plan that is never held against the booked hours. What you get is a well-formatted opinion.

The value lies in the comparison. Three signals can only be read this way:

• Persistent overbooking. Someone who books 20 percent over plan for several weeks signals a staffing problem. The plan was realistic, the staffing is not.
• Systematic underbooking. If planned hours are regularly not used, the project ties up capacity that is missing elsewhere. The staffing must be reduced before the bench grows.
• Shifted curves. If actual hours follow the plan with a two-week delay, the project start has slipped. The engagement ends later, and the follow-on staffing falls apart.

This analysis is only reliable with clean time data. Incomplete bookings produce a utilization rate that looks good and supports nothing. Which booking rules are needed for this is shown in the article on the utilization rate.

Four questions before you decide

Before the first demo, it is worth clarifying your own starting point:

1. How far ahead do we actually plan today? If you know nothing beyond four weeks, you first need a planning process and then a tool.
2. Where does time tracking live? If it sits outside the planning system, you add an interface that has to be maintained, including a second user administration and duplicate master data.
3. Who maintains the plan? A system that only management can operate will no longer be maintained after three months. Project leads need write access to their area.
4. Which report do we really need at month-end? Utilization per person, contribution margin per project and a forecast for the next quarter are three different reports. Check during the trial whether the system delivers all three from the same data.

Conclusion

Resource planning software pays off when planning and booked time sit in the same system. Only then can you correct the plan instead of just extending it, and only then does idle time become visible while it can still be avoided.

In concrete terms, this approach is recommended:

1. Set the planning horizon before you look at vendors. A rolling eight to twelve weeks has proven itself in consultancies, complemented by a rougher view of the current quarter.
2. Calculate your own utilization point. Capacity days times daily rate divided by 100 gives the amount the decision is about.
3. During the pilot, test a real week with real engagements, not demo data. What matters is whether project leads keep the plan up to date without a training manual.
4. Check the plan vs. actual comparison first. Software that only shows both side by side pushes the work back into the spreadsheet.