Can we take this on?
A prospect wants 200 hours in March. Do we have 200 hours in March, and after we say yes, what is left?
Workforce planning
Workforce capacity planning
Headcount times working hours is not capacity. Capacity is what is left after leave, holidays, meetings and the work you have already committed to — and it is the number that decides whether you can say yes to the next project.
Where this lives. Admin area → Planning → Capacity. It reads the attendance, leave, holiday and project records already in your account, so there is nothing to import and nothing extra for your team to maintain.
What capacity actually is
Four subtractions, in order. Most companies do the first and skip the rest, which is why the plan is always optimistic.
| Step | Calculation | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| Contracted hours | 10 people × 22 working days × 8 hours | 1,760 |
| Less public holidays | 1 holiday × 10 people × 8 hours | −80 |
| Less approved leave | From the leave calendar | −120 |
| Less non-billable allowance | Meetings, admin, internal work at 20% | −312 |
| Less committed project work | Hours already promised to live projects | −900 |
| Genuinely available | What you can actually sell | 348 |
1,760 hours of headcount is 348 hours of capacity. That gap — roughly 80% — is why teams that plan from headcount consistently over-commit, and why the fifth row matters more than the first.
What it is built from
Every input is a record the product already holds. Nothing here asks your team to maintain a second system.
| Input | Source | Status today |
|---|---|---|
| Contracted hours | Shift assignment per employee | Live |
| Approved leave | Leave module, with balances and approvals | Live |
| Public holidays | Shared holiday calendar | Live |
| Committed project work | Projects, tasks and estimates | Live |
| Actual effort history | Tracked hours and daily work reports | Live |
| Availability calculation | The capacity view itself | Live |
The questions it is meant to answer
With whom?
Spare hours are only useful if they belong to the right role. Capacity by skill group rather than one company-wide number.
Who is overloaded?
Committed hours above available hours for an individual, visible in the plan rather than discovered when they miss a deadline.
Who is under-used?
The quieter problem. Spare capacity nobody noticed is margin you did not earn.
What does leave do to March?
Three people booking the same week changes the answer. The leave calendar already knows; the plan should too.
Do we need to hire?
Sustained committed-above-available is a hiring signal with a number attached, rather than a feeling that everyone is busy.
Setting it up
Two numbers and your existing records. Most teams are looking at a real capacity figure within ten minutes.
- Set the contracted hours per dayPlanning → Settings. Eight is the default. This is what a working day is worth when projecting forward, separate from what attendance actually records.
- Set the non-billable allowanceMeetings, admin and internal work. Fifteen to twenty-five per cent is the usual range; planning to 100% billable guarantees the plan is missed.
- Allocate committed workPlanning → Scheduling. Hours per person per week against each project. This is the only input the product cannot derive for you.
- Read the capacity viewContracted, minus leave, minus non-billable, minus allocated. The number left is what you can still sell.
Capacity planning questions
What is workforce capacity planning?
Working out how many hours your team genuinely has available in a period, after leave, holidays, non-billable time and work already committed are subtracted. The number left is what you can actually sell or assign, and it is almost always smaller than headcount multiplied by working hours.
How is available capacity calculated?
Contracted hours for the period, minus approved leave, minus public holidays, minus a realistic non-billable allowance for admin, meetings and internal work, minus hours already committed to live projects. Each of those four inputs already exists in Employee Desk.
What is a realistic utilisation target?
For a services team, 70 to 80 percent billable is healthy and 90 percent is a warning sign rather than an achievement — it means there is no slack for sickness, handover or anything going wrong. Planning to 100 percent guarantees you miss.
Can capacity be planned per skill rather than per person?
That is the intention: capacity by role or skill group, because "we have 300 spare hours" is useless if all of them belong to designers and the work is backend. Grouping comes from the department and designation already on each employee record.
Screenshot
Capacity
Contracted hours minus leave, holidays, non-billable time and committed work — what is genuinely available, per person.
Tell us what you need from capacity planning
The more specific the decision you are stuck on, the more it shapes what we build first.
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