In Zoho Projects, Your Job, Your Quote and Your Delivery Plan Are the Same Thing
The job, the quote, and the delivery plan are the same thing. You are deciding which roles are needed, at what skill level, across which weeks, and for how many hours. Lumen’s Quote for Zoho Projects makes that plan visible and validated at phase, task, and subtask level, checked in real time against every live project and every other quote in your pipeline, before the proposal goes out. And when you need to move a resource from one project to another, you can see the answer to the most important question in capacity management: if I move this person, what impact does that have on everything else?
Zoho Projects Quoting and Capacity Planning in One Plugin
Building a quote and building a delivery plan should be the same act. With Lumen’s Quote for Zoho Projects, they are.
You build the quote line by line at phase, task, and subtask levels. As you add each line item, you can see every staff member with the right skill level, what projects they are already working on, and where you have genuine flexibility to place the work.
Lumen’s Quote separates capacity into two states so you always know what is real and what is at risk.
Committed capacity is work already alive in Zoho Projects. It is scheduled, assigned, and protected.
Tentative capacity is work you have quoted but not yet won. It is a real demand that is not yet confirmed, and it needs to be visible when you are making resourcing decisions, because if two or three tentative jobs convert in the same week, you have a constraint you did not see coming.
That distinction is what stops you from double-promising the same people across multiple proposals without realising it.
When the job wins, it converts directly into Zoho Projects. The plan is already there. Nothing is rebuilt. Nothing is re-entered. Nothing is lost.
Zoho Projects Quoting and Capacity Planning in One Plugin
Building a quote and building a delivery plan should be the same act. With Lumen’s Quote for Zoho Projects, they are.
You build the quote line by line at phase, task, and subtask level. As you add each line item, you can see every staff member with the right skill level, what projects they are already working on, and where you have genuine flexibility to place the work.
Lumen’s Quote separates capacity into two states so you always know what is real and what is at risk.
Committed capacity is work already live in Zoho Projects. It is scheduled, assigned, and protected.
Tentative capacity is work you have quoted but not yet won. It is real demand that is not yet confirmed, and it needs to be visible when you are making resourcing decisions, because if two or three tentative jobs convert in the same week, you have a constraint you did not see coming.
That distinction is what stops you from double-promising the same people across multiple proposals without realising it.
When the job wins, it converts directly into Zoho Projects. The plan is already there. Nothing is rebuilt. Nothing is re-entered. Nothing is lost.
How Lumen’s Quote Structures Your Zoho Projects Delivery Plan
Phase, Task and Subtask Planning Built Into Every Quote
Lumen’s Quote uses a cascade view. You build from the top down and can expand or collapse each level as you need it, working at whatever depth the moment requires.
Phase is the major stages of the engagement, for example Discovery, Design, Build, QA, and Launch.
Task is the key deliverables within each phase, for example UX Design, Frontend Development, and Content Migration.
Subtask is the specific units of work within each task, for example Wireframes, Prototype, and User Testing.
Hours, start dates, and end dates roll up automatically. As you build tasks and subtasks, the phase summary updates live, showing total hours, earliest start, and latest end, without any manual calculation. You always have an accurate phase-level view no matter how deep the detail beneath it goes.
Every task and subtask carries the skill type and level required (not just “Designer” but Junior, Mid, or Senior), the precursor task so dependencies are defined from the first line item, the start and end date so the plan is dated not just estimated, and the total hours so capacity demand is calculated automatically and rolled up through the structure.
A phase looks fine until you look inside it.
Take a QA and Testing phase quoted for week 4. At phase level it looks deliverable — the hours are there and the dates fit. But inside that phase are three distinct tasks: QA Lead review, Senior Tester execution, and Junior Tester support. Each requires a different skill level. Each has its own start date and dependency on the task before it.
When you break it down to task level, you can see that the QA Lead is already committed at 100% on another project in week 4. The phase summary never showed that. The conflict was invisible until it became a delivery problem.
That is what task-level planning exposes. Not just what needs doing, but whether the right skill is genuinely free to do it, in the exact week it is needed.
And once the problem is visible at that level, the tool opens the door to see the full implication across every other live project and every quoted job in your pipeline. That is what allows you to make a genuinely informed decision. You can see whether you can negotiate a different start date with the client and what window is actually available, whether you can reallocate a resource from another project without breaking that project’s commitments, whether swapping to a different skill level is feasible for that specific task, what the knock-on effect of any of those moves looks like across the whole portfolio before you commit to it, and whether the constraint is structural enough to justify hiring or bringing in a contractor. That last point matters more than most businesses realise. If a particular skill level is consistently at 100% across your live projects and your pipeline, no amount of re-sequencing will fix it. The data shows you that early enough to act on it, rather than discovering it mid-project when the damage is already done.
Real-Time Resource and Capacity Checking in Zoho Projects
Because every task and subtask already knows what skill level it needs and when, Lumen’s Quote checks availability across your portfolio in real time as you build.
At the moment of quoting you can see whether the right skill level is genuinely free in the weeks this work lands, whether adding this job creates a conflict with an existing project, and whether other quotes in your pipeline, if they convert, would consume the same capacity you are about to promise.
You do not finish the quote and then run a capacity check. The capacity check happens as you build, line by line. If a conflict exists, you see it before the proposal goes out, not after the client has signed.
Why Quoting and Project Planning Fail Without Task-Level Visibility
Without Lumen’s Quote, this is what happens.
You build a quote based on rough role availability and past experience. It wins. Someone opens Zoho Projects and starts rebuilding the plan, re-entering phases, tasks, hours, and assignments that were already worked out during quoting but never formally structured. Halfway through that rebuild, the first conflict appears. The Senior Developer is already committed elsewhere in week 3. The QA resource has leave. Two projects are competing for the same Designer. The dates in the quote are no longer achievable.
That is not a delivery failure. It is a quoting failure, and it happens because the quote and the plan were two separate things built at two separate times without a shared view of capacity.
Lumen’s Quote makes them the same thing.
From Winning Quote to Zoho Projects Delivery Plan Instantly
Because the quote was built as a fully structured delivery plan, with phases, tasks, subtasks, dependencies, skill assignments, dates, and hours, conversion into Zoho Projects is direct.
Nothing is rebuilt. Nothing is re-entered. The project starts from a plan that was validated at the moment of quoting, not pieced together after the client signed.
Every resource assignment, every dependency, and every scheduled hour is already in place. Your team starts delivery from day one rather than spending the first week rebuilding what the quote already defined.
What You Can Promise Clients With Real Capacity Data Behind You
New work. Before the proposal goes out, you know whether the capacity exists at the right skill level in the right weeks, without breaking anything already committed.
Pipeline scenarios. You can see what your capacity looks like if multiple quotes convert, so you are never blindsided by three clients signing in the same week.
Genuine spare capacity. When your portfolio has real availability, you can tell sales exactly which skill levels are free and in which weeks, specific enough to put in a proposal.
What Lumen’s Quote for Zoho Projects Delivers for Resource Utilisation and Capacity
Every quote becomes a fully structured delivery plan at phase, task, and subtask level, validated against your real portfolio load and ready to convert the moment the client signs. Your team starts delivery from day one because the plan was built during quoting, not after winning.
You get real-time capacity visibility at task and subtask level across your entire portfolio, at the moment you need it most. Hours, start dates, and end dates roll up automatically from subtask through task to phase so you always have an accurate summary at every level without manual calculation.
Dependencies are defined from the first line item so the schedule is realistic before anyone has agreed to it. The cascade view lets you work at whatever depth the moment requires, planning at subtask level and presenting at phase level without switching tools or rebuilding anything.
And when the job converts, it goes directly into Zoho Projects with nothing rebuilt, nothing re-entered, and no conflicts hidden inside a phase summary that looked fine until delivery started.
Zoho Projects Quoting and Capacity Planning FAQs
What do we need to have in place before the capacity model is reliable?
Accurate capacity decisions need a clean baseline to work from. That means defined skills, roles, and levels across your team, maintained resource calendars, estimates at task and subtask level for at least your constraint roles, and enough dependency discipline to prevent schedules that look achievable but are not. Lumen sets this up with you during onboarding so it becomes part of how you work, not an additional overhead.
How does Lumen’s Quote connect to Zoho Projects? It is a web app that runs in a web tab inside both Zoho Projects and Zoho CRM. Your team builds jobs and quotes inside Lumen’s Quote, and winning jobs convert directly into Zoho Projects with no migration, no re-entry, and no separate system to maintain.
Do we need to change how we currently quote in Zoho?
You will be building quotes at phase, task, and subtask level rather than as a rough phase-level estimate, which is exactly what makes real-time capacity checking possible and eliminates the rebuild after a job wins. Most teams find it takes a similar amount of time once they are comfortable with the cascade view.
How does Lumen’s Quote handle pipeline work that has not yet won?
Nothing is committed in Zoho Projects until you convert it. Quoted work is visible in your capacity view as tentative demand only, so you can see where unconverted quotes could collide with your committed delivery capacity before you make the promise.
How does the plugin manage skill levels and resource types?
As part of onboarding we define your roles, skill types, and levels so every task and subtask is assigned to the right resource profile. That setup is what makes the capacity checking meaningful rather than generic.
Does Zoho Projects capacity planning work across multiple simultaneous projects?
That is exactly what it is built for. The real-time capacity check only has value when it is looking across the full portfolio, every live project and every quote in the pipeline simultaneously.
What if our projects vary significantly in structure?
The cascade view is flexible. Not every job needs full subtask detail, and you build to the depth the project requires. The structure is there when you need it and not forced when you do not.
See Lumen’s Quote for Zoho Projects in Action
Every quote should be a promise you know you can keep. Stop rebuilding plans and start delivering them.