A provisional booking reserves a planning possibility. It helps the resourcing team see pressure from work that isn't committed yet. Keep it separate from confirmed utilization, revenue and role coverage. A person can look free in a confirmed-only view while several tentative assignments compete for the same time.
Desk Staffing permits provisional reservations to show demand pressure, then validates capacity when you confirm them. Review the person, skill, dates and existing commitments at that point. Confirmation is a status change on the existing booking; creating an extra confirmed copy while keeping the reservation can confuse later reports. Releasing a tentative booking removes the reservation, not the project's demand. A weighted forecast is another separate view: it uses the role's probability and does not convert tentative hours into a confirmed client promise.