Overview
Company: Soleil Digital
Industry: Digital marketing agency
Company size: 1–50 employees
Challenge: Limited visibility and scalability when using Excel for resource planning
Solution: Teambook for visual resource planning and capacity forecasting
Result: Faster planning, clearer ownership, more confident capacity decisions, and stronger team alignment
About Soleil Digital, a digital marketing agency
Soleil Digital is a digital marketing agency juggling multiple projects with a team that keeps growing and evolving. Like most agencies in fast-paced industries, they need to know who’s doing what, who’s available, and how current work impacts what they can take on down the road.
As Soleil Digital expanded, accurate and efficient resource planning became increasingly important. Without better visibility, the risk of bottlenecks, misallocation, and reliance on guesswork grew alongside the team.
The challenge: scaling resource planning beyond Excel
Early on, Soleil Digital used Excel spreadsheets to manage their resource planning. It worked fine at first, but as they took on more projects and hired more people, keeping everything updated became a real headache.
A few problems started showing up:
Limited visibility into workload and availability
They didn’t have a good way to see in real-time who was working on what or who had bandwidth. This made it tough to coordinate and meant planning decisions took longer than they should.
Manual updates and a higher risk of errors
Keeping the spreadsheets current meant constant manual updates. It ate up time and, honestly, mistakes crept in pretty regularly.
No reliable capacity forecasting
Excel just wasn’t built for forecasting capacity months ahead. Looking beyond immediate tasks was tough, which made it hard to back up staffing or hiring decisions with actual numbers.
What Soleil Digital needed from a resource planning tool
When they started looking for something better, Soleil Digital knew what they needed:
Visual, drag-and-drop planning
They wanted instant clarity on who’s doing what, who’s available, and what milestones were coming up. A visual board where they could drag and drop assignments would eliminate the confusion of spreadsheet tabs.
Capacity planning beyond day-to-day scheduling
Beyond immediate tasks, they needed to simulate demand versus availability 6-24 months out. This long-range visibility would make hiring and staffing decisions data-driven rather than guesswork.
Fast, integrated timesheets
Built-in timesheets that could prefill from planned work with one-click approvals would eliminate the tedious back-and-forth of tracking actuals versus plans.
Flexible views and assignment options
Smart filters, tags, and saved views to help assign work by skills and switch between user or project views instantly. The ability to look at their operation from different angles depending on what the moment required.
Real-time team alignment
Calendar sync and mobile apps to keep everyone aligned on the go. A read-only scheduling link for clients would provide real-time visibility with zero back-and-forth.
Straightforward integrations and fair pricing
The tool needed to slip into their existing stack without IT drama. And pricing that made sense, pay by active projects, not unlimited users, with a free trial to start.
Why Soleil Digital chose Teambook for resource planning
Teambook caught their attention because it seemed practical, built for agencies, and checked all their boxes.
Visual resource planning with real-time clarity
The drag-and-drop planning board made it simple to see who was doing what and when, providing instant clarity across the whole team.
Capacity planning and forecasting
With Teambook, they could compare incoming work with who was available and even run “what if” scenarios 6 to 24 months out.
Integrated timesheets connected to planning
The built-in timesheets could auto-fill from planned work with one click, making it easy to see how actual hours stacked up against the plan and approve entries.
Flexible views, filters, and planning logic
Smart filters, tags, and custom views let them plan by skills, roles, or projects, whatever made sense for the moment.
Calendar synchronization and team alignment
Calendar sync and shareable scheduling links kept everyone on the same page in real time, cutting down on confusion and endless email threads.
Plus, Teambook played nicely with their other tools and had pricing based on active projects instead of charging per person.
The impact on planning clarity and capacity decisions
Since switching to Teambook, Soleil Digital has seen real improvements in how they plan and manage their people.
Faster and clearer planning processes
Planning got faster and clearer. Less manual work, fewer scrambles at the last minute.
Improved resource utilization
Being able to actually see workloads helped them balance things better, no more overloading some people while others sat idle.
More confident staffing and hiring decisions
Having solid capacity data gave them confidence to make staffing and hiring calls based on real numbers instead of guesswork.
A shared source of truth for the team
Teambook became their single source of truth, everyone looking at the same current information, way less confusion.
Setup considerations and adoption context
Getting started meant setting up tags, skills, roles, and permissions to match how they work. It took a bit of time upfront, but the payoff came fast.
Once everything was set up, Teambook just worked. It became a reliable part of their daily routine.
Key takeaways for agencies planning resources at scale
For Soleil Digital, switching from Excel to Teambook gave them a straightforward, scalable way to plan without the hassle of manual spreadsheets or bloated PSA systems.
By going with a visual, easy-to-use planning system, they got better clarity, could see capacity issues coming, and found a sustainable way to handle growth, all without making things more complicated than they needed t
