Downloadable templates
Free Excel templates planners can use right away. Each one mirrors a discipline we’ve written about — download, adapt to your operation, share with your team. No sign-up, no email gate.
Available templates
Shrinkage tracker
A weekly build-up of shrinkage by category — holiday, training, breaks, meetings, sickness, other. Calculates total shrinkage automatically and lets you compare actual vs your planning assumption. The kind of working artefact most operations should have but don’t.
Forecasting methods workbook
Twelve weeks of sample daily contact data with four forecasting methods worked side by side — naive, moving average, exponential smoothing, and a day-of-week seasonal forecast — plus a WAPE / MAPE / bias comparison that names the winner. Everything is live formulas: drop in your own actuals or change the smoothing factor and every forecast and score updates. Companion to the forecasting white paper.
Schedule coverage workbook
Lay a set of shifts against an intraday requirement curve and see, half-hour by half-hour, where the roster is over, under, or on target — the over- and under-staffing the schedule designs in before the day begins. Edit the shift table or the requirement and the coverage, the chart, and the coverage score all update. Companion to the scheduling white paper.
Forecast accuracy log
Track forecast vs actual by week and channel. Calculates MAPE, WAPE, and bias automatically. Comes with four sample rows so you can see the formulas in action; delete and replace with your own data. The headline metric we recommend is WAPE; the template makes that the default.
Forecast accuracy floor & fair benchmark
Work out the accuracy your operation can actually reach instead of the target it inherited. Enter your mean volume per window, your measured model error and a small margin; the workbook returns a defensible benchmark for each grain and flags any target that’s tighter than the maths allows. Includes a natural-noise band helper and a RAG tracker keyed to the fair benchmark. Companion to the book appendix — short link ccplanning.net/floor.
One-page MI pack template
A starter structure for replacing your 40-page MI deck with a single page that gets read. Four zones: headline (verdict + driver + action), comparison (target / actual / prior), trajectory (the trend story), callout (the planning team’s voice). Use as-is or adapt to your audience.
Capacity plan
A working capacity model: a required-FTE profile by month against an available line that rolls forward with attrition and hires, with the gap and a RAG status calculated for you. Blue cells are inputs; the rest is formulas. The artefact behind the Capacity Planning white paper.
WFM vendor selection scorecard
Twelve weighted criteria — forecasting, scheduling, intraday, integrations, TCO and more — that you weight to your own priorities, score 1–5 per vendor, and the sheet computes a weighted total and rank for you. Built to be filled in before the demos, so a slick presentation can’t move the goalposts. Includes a how-to-use guide tab.
Quality scorecard & calibration tracker
Two tools in one workbook. The scorecard is a weighted QA form — twelve criteria you reweight to your own definition of good, scored 1–5, with a fatal-error flag that fails the contact regardless of points (compliance breach, mis-sale, data-protection failure). The calibration tracker takes every evaluator’s score on the same sample contacts and shows the spread — where evaluators disagree by more than your threshold, your scoring isn’t calibrated yet. Re-run the samples each session and watch the average range fall.
Cheat sheets & checklists
One-page PDFs to print, pin up or share — the essentials at a glance.
Erlang cheat sheet
Offered load, the B/C/A/X models in one line each, and the rules of thumb — 80/20 is a convention, occupancy is an output, net vs gross. The page to keep next to your screen.
Shrinkage category checklist
A tick-list of the planned and unplanned shrinkage categories so nothing slips through — plus the discipline: measure from actuals, reconcile, forecast by period, gross up.
Peak planning checklist
The Black Friday / Christmas checklist — forecasting the compounding peak, back-planning the autumn hire, matching the flex lever, and writing the surge playbook before the storm.
The planning year (annual calendar)
What a workforce planner is doing each month — from the post-peak review and budget in January to the autumn peak hire and the December surge. A rough annual rhythm to adapt to your own peaks.
More coming
The templates list will grow. Next on the queue:
- Schedule review meeting agenda — Word template for the weekly TL schedule review
- Cost-of-attrition workings — Excel walking through the full per-leaver build-up
- Real-time playbook starter pack — Word templates for the six common playbook scenarios
Tell us in the discussion on LinkedIn what would be most useful and we’ll prioritise.
All templates are CC-BY licensed: free to use, share, and adapt, including commercially — please keep the credit line in the read-me tab if you publish a derivative.