Bookable resources and resource types

What it does

A bookable resource is the thing the scheduling engine actually books. It is a record in its own right, not a view over a user — a person, a van, a subcontractor firm, a workshop bay or a group of any of those can all be a bookable resource, and each one carries its own calendar, location, skills and territories.

Key facts

Seven resource types ship out of the box: User, Account, Contact, Equipment, Crew, Facility and Pool. The type is chosen on the General tab and drives what the schedule assistant will return for a given requirement.
Only User-type resources have a Dataverse user behind them, so only User resources can sign in to the Field Service mobile app. Equipment, Account and Contact resources are scheduled by someone else.
Account and Contact types are how subcontractors get onto the board without needing licences or system access.
Name and Time Zone are required. The time zone drives how the resource's work hours are rendered, so getting it wrong quietly shifts everyone's availability.
Start Location and End Location on the Scheduling tab take one of three values: Location Agnostic, Resource Address, or Organizational Unit Address. Location Agnostic means no travel time is calculated to or from that end of the day.
Two independent switches control visibility: Display On Schedule Board and Enable for Availability Search. The first controls the board, the second controls schedule assistant results. They are not linked.
The Field Service tab adds Hourly Rate (used for booking journal costing), Warehouse (default parts source), and Time Off Approval Required.
Travel time needs real coordinates. The resource record itself isn't geocoded — the related User, Account, Contact or organisational unit is, via the Geo Code button or the auto-geocoding setting.
Deactivating a resource does not cancel its bookings. Existing and future bookings survive and have to be reassigned by hand.
Facilities take their location from the organisational unit, not from an address on the resource. See facility scheduling for the customer-comes-to-you pattern.

When to use / skip

There is no skipping this one — nothing schedules without bookable resources. The judgement is in how many non-User resources you create. Most projects over-model here: they create Equipment resources for every van and every specialist tool, then discover that the vans are never independently scheduled and the tools are always with a named engineer. Create an Equipment resource only when the asset genuinely constrains the schedule on its own — a crane, a specialist rig, a vehicle with a fixed licence — and when the dispatcher actually wants to see it as a row on the board. Facility resources are worth it the moment any part of the business is workshop- or depot-based rather than purely mobile. Account and Contact resources earn their place as soon as subcontractors do real work, because the alternative is buying licences for people who will never open the app.

Configuration decisions

Which resource type each population of workers falls into, and specifically whether subcontractors are Contact resources, Account resources, or licensed Users. That decision drives licence cost and mobile app access, and it is awkward to change once bookings exist.
Start and end location per resource population: home address (Resource Address), depot (Organizational Unit Address), or Location Agnostic. This is the single biggest driver of whether travel time looks sane on day one.
Whether Hourly Rate is populated and therefore whether booking journals produce meaningful cost figures, or whether costing lives entirely in a finance system.
Whether Warehouse is set per resource, per organisational unit, or left blank — this determines where van stock is deducted from.
The naming convention for resources. The Name field is what the dispatcher reads on the board all day, and it is not the same field as the user's full name.
Whether Time Off Approval Required is on, which decides if time off is self-service or goes through a scheduling manager.

Gotchas

Creating a Dataverse user does not create a bookable resource, and enabling a user for Field Service does not always produce a fully configured one. Resources routinely appear on the board with no work hours, no territory and no start location, and then never surface in the schedule assistant.
Enable for Availability Search set to No is the most common reason "the resource exists but the schedule assistant won't return them". People check Display On Schedule Board, see it is Yes, and stop looking.
A missing or wrong Time Zone shifts the whole calendar. It shows up as an engineer who appears to start at 03:00.
Ungeocoded related records mean zero travel time and a resource that sits at the map origin. Turn on auto-geocoding early rather than fixing latitude and longitude by hand later.
Deactivating a leaver leaves their future bookings in place. Reassign the work first, then deactivate.
Resource Type cannot be sensibly changed after the fact. A Contact resource that should have been a User has to be recreated, and the booking history goes with the old record.

Consultant notes

Build a resource onboarding checklist and hand it to the client's admin: type, time zone, work hours, start and end location, territory, characteristics, category, geocode confirmed. Most "scheduling is broken" tickets in the first month are one of those eight fields.
Demo the difference between Display On Schedule Board and Enable for Availability Search explicitly. It reads as a duplicate setting until someone sees a resource on the board that the assistant refuses to suggest.
Push back on modelling every vehicle as Equipment. Ask the dispatcher whether they would ever book the van without the driver — if the answer is no, it belongs in a crew or nowhere.
Before go-live, run the map view of the schedule board with all resources shown. Anything sitting off the coast of West Africa is an ungeocoded record.
Agree the leaver and joiner process with the client, in writing. Deactivation not cancelling bookings surprises people six months in, not during UAT.

Worth another look if Microsoft adds resource types or changes how non-User resources are licensed.