SuperPlanner Automations: Automate Resource Planning in monday.com

7 minute(s)

SuperPlanner automations help you keep your task planning timelines accurate without the need for manual updates. Use automations to move PTO approvals directly to your SuperPlanner app and turn time tracking and calendar events into planned effort automatically to reduce duplicate work, avoid capacity planning mistakes, and keep resource availability up to date.

How to Set Up SuperPlanner Automations

There are three main ways to configure SuperPlanner automations in monday.com.

Use Pre-Built Automations

The first option is to use monday.com’s built-in Automation Center.

Navigate to the Automation Center and search for SuperPlanner. Select SuperPlanner and you’ll see the available pre-configured automation recipes.

This is the fastest way to start if you want to use one of the ready-made automations.

Create a Custom Automation

The second option is to create your own automation.

Click Create automation, choose the trigger that matches your workflow, and then search for SuperPlanner when selecting the action. From there, you can choose one of the available SuperPlanner automation recipes.

This option gives you more flexibility because you can decide exactly what should trigger the SuperPlanner action.

For example, you may want the automation to run when a status changes, when a time tracking column updates, when dates are added, or when a new item is created.

Use monday.com Workflow

The third option is to use monday.com’s Workflow feature.

Workflows let you build more customized processes with multiple steps, conditions, and actions. This is useful when your planning process involves more than one trigger or when you want SuperPlanner to be part of a larger operational flow.

For example, you could create a workflow that starts with a calendar event, creates an item on a board, calculates the meeting duration, and then updates SuperPlanner with the relevant effort hours.

SuperPlanner Automation Use Cases

SuperPlanner includes several automations designed to support common planning and resource management processes.

Convert Time Tracking to Actual Effort

Many people prefer using monday.com’s native time tracking column to track how long work actually takes. The challenge is that tracked time still needs to be reflected in your resource planning data.

With SuperPlanner, you can configure an automation that says:

When the Time Tracking column changes, convert Time Tracking to hours in Actual Effort.

This means your team can continue tracking time directly in monday.com, while SuperPlanner automatically updates the actual effort hours used for resource allocation and reporting.

This is useful when you want to compare planned work against actual work, improve future estimates, and understand how much time tasks really take.

Instead of manually calculating hours or copying data between columns, SuperPlanner keeps the actual effort column updated for you.

Automate PTO Approvals

Vacation and time-off management can quickly create problems for resource planning. If approved PTO is not added to your workload view, managers may assign work to someone who is unavailable.

SuperPlanner helps solve this by allowing you to connect PTO approvals directly to your planning data.

For example, your team can manage vacation requests on a dedicated monday.com board. When an employee submits a request and the status changes to Approved, a SuperPlanner automation can automatically create a PTO entry for that employee.

Once the PTO is added, it appears in SuperPlanner’s workload view, and the person’s availability is updated automatically.

This helps managers see who is available, who is away, and whether upcoming work can realistically be assigned.

Remove PTO When Vacation Is Canceled

PTO updates need to work both ways. If a vacation request is approved and later canceled, that change should also be reflected in your SuperPlanner portal.

With SuperPlanner, you can create another automation that removes the PTO entry when the vacation status changes from Approved to Rejected or Canceled.

This keeps capacity accurate without requiring someone to manually delete the PTO from SuperPlanner.

The result is a smoother planning process: approved vacations reduce availability, and canceled vacations restore availability automatically.

Convert Dates to Timeline and Effort

Some teams prefer working with regular date columns instead of monday.com’s Timeline column. Others may receive start and end dates from external sources, forms, calendar events, or imported data.

SuperPlanner can help by converting dates into a timeline and effort hours automatically.

This automation is useful when you want to add a start date and end date to an item and have SuperPlanner calculate the relevant timeline and hours without manual setup.

It is especially helpful for teams that do not want to work directly with the Timeline column or want to avoid manually calculating the amount of time between two dates.

Smart Assign

Assigning work manually takes time and often leads to uneven workloads. SuperPlanner’s Smart Assign automatically assigns the best person (or people) to a task using either a SuperPlanner Automation or a Sidekick AI prompt.

Instead of relying on manual assignments, Smart Assign considers factors that you prioritize, such as skills, availability, current workload, and task timelines to make informed assignment decisions automatically.

To use a SuperPlanner automation for smart task assignment: create a custom automation and then choose Smart Assign when prompted to “Then do this”. When active, this automation will assign resources based on role and skill.

To use Smart Assign via monday Sidekick, create a task, then prompt Sidekick to assign a resource (or resources) based on the parameters you set.

Example Sidekick Prompts

• Assign this task to the team member with the required skills and the most availability.
• Find the best available person for this task based on workload and timeline.
• Assign this project to the most suitable resource without exceeding anyone’s capacity.
• Distribute these tasks evenly across the team to everyone with the required skills.
• Assign the highest-priority tasks first to available team members with the right expertise.
• Recommend the best person for this task and explain why they were selected.
• Assign this task to two people with complementary skills who are both available during the project timeline.
• Choose the best resource for this task while avoiding anyone who is over capacity.

Using Sidekick for Smart Assign goes beyond automatic task assignment. It explains why a resource was selected, flags potential scheduling or capacity issues, and suggests solutions before work is assigned. For example, if an upcoming task exceeds your team’s available capacity, Sidekick will alert you and recommend ways to rebalance the workload or adjust the plan.

• Pro tip: Pair Smart Assign with a notification automation to ensure every assignment is communicated immediately.

Sync Calendar Events to SuperPlanner

Meetings take time, but they are often missing from workload and capacity planning. This can create an inaccurate picture of availability, especially for teams that spend many hours each week in meetings. With SuperPlanner, meetings and calendar events can be added to the workload view automatically, so your capacity plan reflects all scheduled time, not only task-based work.

To set this up:

• Create start date and end date columns on your board
• Create an automation with the recipe: When event is created in Google Calendar, create an item, and sync future changes from Google Calendar. You can create the same automation to sync to Outlook Calendar as well.
• Configure the item so that the start date and end date pulls the Start time and End time from the calendar event

• Create an automation to change a status when a new item is created.
• Create a third automation using a SuperPlanner recipe: When status changes to something, convert start date and end date to Timeline and set Planned Effort. This automation will pull the event times directly into your SuperPlanner to avoid overbooking.

Resource planning is only useful when the data is accurate. If PTO, actual effort, timelines, and calendar events are not updated consistently, workload views can quickly become misleading.

SuperPlanner automations help resolve these issues by automating updates within SuperPlanner so that your team has full visibility into tasks and availability at all times.