A live roster of the associates and subcontractors you trust, with skills, sectors, day rates, availability, past performance, and the paperwork status that decides whether you can actually put them on a client site next week. Describe your network and a Taskade Genesis app builds the bench.
The Team Capacity Planner app is a live Taskade Genesis build embedded on this page, structured as a working register of people and the hours each of them can take. Use it here, then click "Use this app" to clone it in about ten seconds and describe your own bench so the records become your associates and subcontractors with rates and skills.
The moment a small firm can staff a bigger engagement without hiring is the moment it can sell bigger engagements. That capability lives or dies on whether you know, in five minutes, who is good, who is free, and who is already cleared to work. Workspace DNA holds all three. Memory keeps the history of every engagement each associate worked and how it went. Intelligence, backed by 15+ frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and open-weight providers, matches a scoped engagement to the best available combination and flags the gaps. Execution sends the availability check and the onboarding pack without you writing either.
The bench renders in whichever layout you need:
- Table view for the roster with skills, sector, rate, and availability
- Board view for the pipeline of associates from prospect to vetted to active
- Calendar view for who is free in which weeks
- Org Chart view for how a proposed delivery team fits together on an engagement
- Plus the rest of the 7 project views
Automations keep the roster true. Connect Taskade automations so a monthly availability check goes out automatically, expiring insurance or agreements flag before they lapse, and a new engagement in the pipeline triggers a shortlist. With 100+ bidirectional integrations, forms and Gmail pull availability replies and documents in while Slack and Gmail push the requests and the shortlists out.
The AI agents inside the app carry 34 built-in tools including persistent memory, file analysis, web search, custom slash commands, and multi-agent collaboration. Give the staffing agent a scoped engagement and it returns two or three viable team shapes with the cost of each, which turns a stressful scramble into a choice.
Clone it, keep the commercial detail restricted, and the bench is yours. Rate history and performance notes are exactly what you need when a client asks for a named team in a proposal.
Build your own roster in Taskade Genesis, see live people apps in the Community Gallery, or learn field setup in Learn. Match it against demand in Plan Consultant Capacity Week by Week, and price the mix in Scope and Price a New Engagement.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should I record about each associate?
Skills and sectors, day rate and any rate history, availability pattern, the engagements they have worked with an honest performance note, and the paperwork: agreement signed, insurance, and any client-specific clearance. The paperwork field is the one people skip and regret.
How do I keep availability current without nagging?
Send a short automated monthly check with one question and a two-click answer. Associates who work across several firms are used to it, and a monthly cadence is frequent enough to be useful without becoming an irritation.
Can it help me build a proposed team for a bid?
Yes. Give it the scoped engagement and the agent proposes team shapes with cost, availability, and relevant experience, which you can drop into a proposal as named or anonymized profiles depending on what the client asked for.
How do I handle rates confidentially?
Restrict the commercial fields to the people who need them. The staffing view can show skills and availability broadly while day rates and margins stay visible only to whoever prices work.
What if an associate performs badly on an engagement?
Record it factually against the engagement rather than as a general judgement, noting what the situation was. Patterns across several engagements are meaningful, a single difficult project usually is not, and the record lets you tell the difference a year later.
Does this work for referring work out as well as in?
Yes, and it is an underused benefit. When an enquiry is not right for you, a good bench lets you refer it to someone competent, which builds the reciprocal relationships that bring work back.
How is this different from just keeping a contact list?
A contact list tells you who exists. A bench tells you who is available, cleared, priced, and proven, which is the difference between hoping you can staff an engagement and knowing you can before you sign it.
How do I keep good associates interested between engagements?
Stay in contact when you have nothing to offer. The associates who answer quickly are the ones who hear from you more than twice a year, and a short monthly note with what you are seeing in the market costs almost nothing. Paying promptly matters just as much, because associates talk to each other and a reputation for slow payment quietly removes you from the top of their list. The bench tracks last contact alongside availability, so the people you want to keep close surface before they have drifted, and the agent can draft the note that keeps the relationship warm without it reading as a broadcast.
