By Ben Vloemans, CTO at Teamleader

Today we are very happy to announce our fully rebuilt version of the Teamleader Orbit planner. It’s the biggest change we have made to the product recently, and we can’t wait to share it with all of our agency customers.

Before we dive into what’s new, let's look at why we decided to rebuild the planner. Spoiler: it’s because of the feedback we received directly from agencies.

Teamleader Orbit has always been strong at day-to-day planning. Assigning tasks, tracking time, keeping projects moving: that part worked really well. But agencies kept telling us the same thing: we also want to plan our long-term capacity!

It’s true that Teamleader Orbit has always been the master at planning the days and the week, but not a whole quarter for example. So agencies did what they always do: they got creative. They patched everything together with spreadsheets, separate tools and manual fixes.

It works … For a while. When it breaks, the results are disastrous: teams are suddenly overbooked, you miss crucial deadlines, and margins leak away without anyone noticing.

But workarounds like this come at a cost: spreadsheets can break, tools can change their infrastructure, long-term planning isn't really interacting with the day-to-day execution … The list is long and the result is that long term capacity decisions become guesses. 

Luckily, those days are over.

Because for the first time, your long-term planning and your day-to-day execution finally live in the same place.

The new Teamleader Orbit planner now features macro planning, for high-level, long-term planning across weeks or months, and micro planning for detailed, day-by-day scheduling.

But that’s not all. This release packs a couple of other very useful features as well:

• Hybrid planning with reservations: Sometimes you know a project will require 20 hours next month, you just don't know which days yet. The reservation layer lets you block that time without locking it in.
• Natural drag-and-drop interface: Need to plan or reserve time? Just drag across the time frame and you're done. 
• Project-centric planning: Flip the planner to a project view and instantly see when work is happening on a specific project, and who's involved. No more wondering where things stand. Catch bottlenecks before they delay projects and eat into your margins.
• Google Calendar visualization: Your team's external meetings now show up directly in the planner. You finally see real availability, so you stop overbooking your team and burning them out in the process.
• Live capacity insights: Get a live view of who has room for more work and who's already drowning. Spot overload before it hits your team, and fix it before it costs you deadlines or margin.
• Expanded time displays: Plan work the way your team actually operates. A 24-hour view sits alongside the standard 8-hour view, so whether your people work night shifts or across time zones, you avoid the gaps, overlaps, and costly blind spots that quietly mess up your schedule.

The vision behind the rebuild was always simple: agencies just need one great tool. A central source of truth. The new planner makes this a reality. It connects daily task management with big-picture, long-term capacity planning. No more flying blind through the galaxy. Welcome to planet Orbit.

Here's something our data keeps showing us: agencies that plan their capacity upfront reach a billability of 70%, while those that don't only reach 60%. Most agencies dream of that 70% but never get anywhere near it, and it's not because they don't care. It's because their tools never let them. But Teamleader Orbit will.
We're rolling out the new Orbit planner to a first group of agencies now. If you want to see how capacity planning should actually work, this is the moment to put your hand up. Once you see it, you'll never want to go back to spreadsheets.