What is capacity and how is it calculated?

Capacity shows how much of a Person's working time is booked versus available — built from their working hours, adjusted for time off, holidays, and employment dates.

Written By Lauri Eurén

Last updated 1 day ago

Capacity is how much of a Person's working time is available for work, shown as the percentage booked against the percentage available. Operating builds it from each Person's working hours and subtracts the time they can't work — when someone is away, they're not delivering, so capacity reflects that directly for a realistic forecast.

What sets a Person's available hours

A Person's available working time on any given day is resolved in this order:

  1. Weekends count as zero.

  2. Outside employment dates (before they start or after they leave) count as zero.

  3. Confirmed full-day Time off removes the day entirely — zero available hours.

  4. Public holidays reduce the day by the holiday's percentage (a half-day holiday removes half the hours).

  5. Otherwise, the day uses the Person's individual working hours if set, falling back to the Site's standard working hours.

Individual working hours always override the Site default. This is why a part-time Person changes a Project's effort totals: an unfilled Position planned against a Site's 40-hour week looks different once you assign someone who works 32 hours.

How time off interacts with planned work

Full-day and partial Time off behave differently where they meet an Allocation:

  • Full-day Time off removes availability and ignores any work allocated over it. If a Person is allocated 100% to a Project for a week but takes that whole week off, Operating does not count the overlapping work — they cannot deliver it. A tentative Allocation overlapping the time off is ignored too.

  • Partial Time off reduces availability proportionally but does not ignore the overlapping work. If a Person is 50% off for a week and also has 100% of project work planned that week, Operating reads it as 50% (time off) + 50% + 50% (the project work) = 150% booked — an overbooking signal, not a silently absorbed one.

That 150% is a prompt to look closer: is the Person really half-away every day, or away for the first half of the week and back for the second? Adjusting the Allocations to match reality resolves the over-100% reading.

Capacity is not utilization

Capacity and utilization both build on a Person's working hours, but they answer different questions and aren't the same number.

  • Capacity is a forward-looking planning view — how much of someone's available time is already booked.

  • Utilization measures what share of working time went to work (billable client work, by default), and its formula is configurable in Settings.

The two also treat time off differently: capacity removes full-day Time off from what's available, while utilization keeps time off in its denominator by default — so time off lowers utilization unless a firm changes the formula to subtract it. See How utilization is calculated in Operating.

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