Actuals — plan vs reported — Resourcing

The Actuals tab is where the plan meets reality. Everywhere else in Resourcing you are looking forward — who should do the work. Actuals looks back: for each person, week by week, it puts the hours they were planned for next to the hours they actually reported in Time Tracking, and shows the gap between the two.

That gap — the variance — is the number the tab exists to produce. It answers the one question a plan on its own never can: did it survive contact with reality?

Contract labels

The person's subtitle describes contracted hours across the visible weeks. A contract change from 20 to 40 hours shows 20–40 h/week. A stable part-time agreement may also show its FTE fraction, calculated against that agreement's full-time reference week. Capacity assumed identifies weeks whose contract details are unavailable. This subtitle describes the contract; the reported and planned figures remain the measurements for each week.

How to read a cell

Each cell is a small bullet chart. The filled bar is the hours the person actually reported that week; the line drawn across it is the plan. Reading the two together tells you the story at a glance:

Fill past the line — they reported more than the plan. Someone quietly doing more than the plan admits is exactly the thing that stays invisible until a project is late.
Fill short of the line — they reported less than the plan, whether because the work slipped or because the time was never logged.
Fill level with the line — plan and reality agree. This is what healthy looks like.

Everything is measured against that person's own contracted week. Someone on a 0.6 FTE contract who reports their full part-time week reads as fully delivered against a full plan — not as a shortfall. The share is always relative to the hours they are contracted for.

Two empty cells look similar but mean different things:

An empty fill inside a plan line — the person was booked, but nothing was reported against that week. The loudest signal on the screen, and it costs no extra reading.
A cell with no line and no fill — the person had no active contract that week, so there is nothing to measure. This reads as no contract, not as a miss.

The variance column

The right-hand column totals the period into one figure per person: the reported hours against the planned hours, as a percentage and in hours. It is coloured so the outliers find you — over the plan, under the plan, or holding exactly. "Plan held" is the quiet, healthy case.

Where the hours went

In Hours mode, the variance is reported hours minus planned hours on rows, phone cards and totals. With 8 h reported and no plan, it reads +8 h with No planned hours; a percentage against a zero plan is unavailable.

Expanding a row splits reported hours by project, largest first. Unreported counts unused contracted capacity on completed reporting days only. The view states the exclusive cutoff date and reporting timezone. Today and future dates are excluded, and their capacity appears separately as Today and future capacity. A future week with no reports reads Upcoming.

For example, if Monday had 8 h of capacity and 2 h reported, Tuesday's view shows 6 h unreported. Hours dated Tuesday or later remain in the reported total but do not erase Monday's gap. Capacity follows the person's agreement and the requested dates. With a project filter, capacity and unreported hours are unavailable because a person's capacity does not belong to one project.

Unreported is deliberately its own line, with its own hatched marker, and it is never quietly folded into another category. It is a gap in the data before it is anything else — usually a prompt to go and log the missing time, never proof that nothing happened.

That breakdown covers the whole period on screen. The same question about a single week is answered by opening that week's cell — see The Actuals drill-downs.

Utilisation, revenue and margin

Above the grid, a Hours / Utilisation / Money switch changes what the right-hand column measures — the plan-vs-reported bullet chart underneath stays the same.

Utilisation answers how much of each person's week went to billable work. It is billable hours ÷ that person's own contracted week. A project counts as billable when its type is fixed-price or time-and-material; internal and non-billable projects do not. The row also splits the reported hours into billable and non-billable, so an under-utilised week and a busy-but-unbillable week no longer look the same.
Money puts revenue and margin on each person. Revenue is billable hours × that person's charge rate for the project; cost is all their logged hours × their cost rate — time spent is time spent, billable or not; margin is the difference. Everything is shown in your organisation's currency, converting where a rate or a contract is held in another.

For a monthly salary with fixed weekly working time, the hourly cost uses the working days in that month and the person's contracted weekly hours. Each nominal working day is one fifth of that weekly amount: a 24-hour contract uses 4.8 hours per working day. This keeps an already pro-rated salary from being spread across a full-time hour total. Agreements billed by the hour use their stated hourly amount.

Two honesty rules apply. Where a person has no charge rate for a project, or no cost contract, those hours are left out of the totals and the person shows a dash — never a fabricated zero — with a note at the top counting how many were excluded. And access is in two steps: the Actuals tab as a whole, Utilisation included, is open only to people who can manage resourcing, while Money is offered on top of that only to those whose permissions cover resourcing financials. A colleague who reads the plan alongside you may therefore have Hours and Utilisation but no Money switch at all.

In the desktop Money column, revenue appears above margin. The margin amount and its percentage may occupy two lines; each stays together so a line break cannot split a number. Grid amounts are rounded to whole currency units.

A person's revenue and margin figures open into the projects behind them. See The Actuals drill-downs, which also explains why a per-project cost is an allocation rather than a measurement.

Choosing the period

Above the grid sit Previous week, the range on screen, Next week, Today, and a month picker. The heading names the exact range, for example 20 Jul – 20 Sep 2026.

The two motions do different jobs, and it is worth knowing which you want. The arrows slide the window one week at a time — the right size for lining the grid up on a particular fortnight, and the reason they are named for the week rather than the period. The month picker jumps: choose a month and the window reopens on that month's first full week. Actuals is the tab you come to for time already reported, so travelling back is the ordinary thing to do here — the picker is how you get somewhere months away without pressing an arrow over and over.

Today returns to the current week.

The window is a fixed run of weeks and stays that length. Actuals has no zoom control, because its figures are held by the week: there is no shorter unit to open a week into, and spreading a week's hours across five days to draw a day column would produce numbers that look reported but were invented.

Where this sits

Actuals reads two things Flowtly already holds — the bookings that make up the plan, and the time tracked against projects — and puts them in one place so nobody has to do the subtraction in their head. It changes nothing: it reports. Booking and confirming still happen on Projects; logging time still happens in Time Tracking.

Example use cases

Spotting quiet overtime: Look for cells where the filled bar runs past the plan line to see who reports more than was planned.
Finding missing time reports: Look for an empty fill inside a plan line to see who was booked but reported nothing that week.
Checking billable utilisation: Switch to Utilisation to see how much of each person's contracted week went to billable work.
Reviewing revenue and margin: Switch to Money, where your permissions allow, to see revenue and margin for each person over the period.