Capacity by person

Flowtly Editorial Team7 min

Capacity by project answers is this work covered. The People view answers the other half of the same question: how full is everyone. Rows are people, columns are weeks, and each cell is a meter showing how much of that person's week is committed.

Select People above the grid to open it.

Reading a row

Each row states who the person is, then how full each of their weeks is.

The name is followed by their role and contracted week — Specialist · 40h/wk. Someone on a part-time contract carries the fraction too: UX Designer · 24h/wk (0.6 FTE).

Each cell fills from the bottom. The empty space above the fill is capacity that is still free, and a line across the track marks a full week. Over that line the cell is marked in red.

Everyone with a contract appears, not only the people who are booked. A week with nothing on it shows an empty track and reads free. That empty track is the whole answer to "who is available" — there is no separate bench list on this view, and nothing to keep up to date.

People who have left are not shown, because there is no capacity to plan against.

Part-time contracts are measured against their own week

A meter on this view is measured against that person's contracted week, not against a notional full-time one.

Someone on 0.6 FTE has a 24-hour week, so 20 booked hours fills 83% of their capacity — and the cell says 83%, not 50%. There is no dividing in your head, and no row that looks comfortable only because the person is part-time.

If Flowtly cannot read someone's agreement, the row says so: the subtitle reads No active agreement instead of a role and hours. The row still appears and still shows their bookings, but its meters are measured against a full-time week as an assumption. That is worth knowing before acting on the number — the fix is to complete the person's agreement.

Colour is per project

Someone working across several projects shows a stacked cell, one band per project, so a full week made of three commitments reads differently from a full week made of one.

Two roles on the same project stack as two bands in the same colour with a hairline between them — the load is split across two jobs, and the seam is what shows it. Internal and non-billable work is drawn in muted grey.

The colours are drawn from a small palette rather than being reserved per project, so they separate the projects stacked inside one cell rather than naming a project across the whole grid.

Leave reduces capacity, it does not just tint the cell

Approved holidays take the time out of the week rather than shading over it, so a booking that now overlaps time that no longer exists shows as the conflict it is.

  • Away for part of the week with something booked, and the cell reads a ratio — 100 / 40: 100% planned against the 40% actually left. If the plan exceeds what remains, the cell is red, even when the first number is exactly 100.
  • Away for the whole week, and the cell reads leave and counts as no capacity at all.
  • Away for part of the week with nothing booked, and it reads leave too — some of the week is gone, but there is no plan to weigh against it.

Reading a cell

The cell says It means
75% 75% of this person's contracted week is committed.
100 / 40 100% planned against the 40% still available after leave.
free Nothing booked, nothing proposed, nobody away.
leave Away for the whole week. No capacity.
75% draft A proposal that has not been confirmed.
needs 100% An open role. Nobody is assigned.

Drafts are drawn, but not counted

A confirmed booking is a solid fill. A draft — a proposal that has not been confirmed — is drawn as a dashed outline over the cell instead.

Drafts are shown so you can see what has been sketched, but they are not counted anywhere on this view: not in the percentage, not in the red over-capacity marking, and not in a department's average. A week whose only booking is a draft reads 75% draft and the person still counts as having room.

That is the same rule the rest of Resourcing follows — see The bench and draft bookings.

Departments

Rows are grouped by the person's department, and each group carries a summary line:

  • How many people are in it.
  • avg 65% — the average load across every person and every week on screen in that group, each measured against their own contract.
  • One exception, when there is one: 2 overallocated in red, or 1 with free capacity. Overallocated counts people with at least one week over capacity, not weeks — it is a count of who to go and talk to. A group that is both overbooked and carrying idle time shows only the overallocation, because that is the one to fix first.

Use the chevron beside a department to collapse it and get the height back for the teams you are looking at. Groups start expanded.

People with no department appear after the named groups, past a gap and under no heading. Flowtly does not invent a department name for them; the gap ends the last department rather than titling a new one. Screen readers announce the boundary as Not in a department.

Open roles

A role nobody is assigned to yet appears as its own amber row beneath the people, reading Specialist — open over the project it belongs to. Its cells show the demand as needs 100%, and the weeks before the role opens are left blank.

Open rows are never marked red — an open role is a gap, not an overbooking, and the amber row already says so. Declare what a role needs with Declare a need, above the grid; see Setting a role's demand.

Setting the role filter to Open roles only leaves just these rows. Every person row disappears, because a person row is staffed by definition — the person it names.

Choosing the period

The period controls sit at the head of the filter band above the grid, ahead of the filters themselves — the period is one more way of narrowing the same plan, not a separate screen.

The grid shows nine weeks at a time, and the heading names the exact range on screen, for example 20 Jul – 20 Sep 2026.

  • Previous and Next move the window by one week, so the plan slides rather than jumps.
  • Today returns to the current week.
  • The month pill jumps the window to a chosen month.

The zoom offers Weeks and Days. Weeks is the view above; Days opens the same plan a day at a time.

Days: opening a week up

Weeks tells you how full a week is. Days tells you which day.

Select a week's heading to open that week into its days, or switch the zoom to Days. Either way the grid redraws as twelve day columns — a full week from Monday to Sunday, then the following Monday to Friday — with weekend columns narrowed and dimmed. Previous, Next and Today step this window a week at a time, and switching back to Weeks returns you to exactly the week window you left.

A day cell is measured against that day's scheduled hours, not against a fifth of the week. That is the whole reason to open it:

  • A day nobody works is drawn as a dash, not as a fraction. A weekend and a contracted day off are the same thing here — no scheduled hours — and are shown the same way. A booking whose dates run across such a day is not drawn on it, because there is no capacity there for it to occupy.
  • A full working day reads 100%, whatever the contract. Someone whose working week is three days shows those three days at 100% and the rest as non-working, rather than looking 60% available on five days they never agreed to. This one depends on their work schedule covering the period — see below.
  • Leave lands on the days it was taken. A week that read 100 / 40 becomes three specific days marked leave, with the booking still sitting on exactly those days — which is the thing to move. Leave is whole-day at this zoom: a day either is leave or it is not.

Where a day's hours come from

Flowtly reads each person's work schedule for this: the schedule is what says which days someone works and how long.

Where no schedule covers a date, Flowtly falls back to the weekly agreement — a standard Monday-to-Friday week, each weekday carrying the person's contracted fraction, the weekend non-working. That fallback is the week's own answer drawn per day: it still puts leave and bookings on the right dates, but it cannot know that a part-timer works Monday to Wednesday, so it shows them at the same reduced level on all five weekdays instead. If a day view looks flatter than you expect, an unset work schedule is what to check.

Reading a day cell

The cell says It means
No scheduled hours. A weekend, or a day this person does not work.
100% This day's scheduled hours are fully committed.
free Scheduled to work, nothing booked.
leave Away for the day. No capacity.
50% draft A proposal that has not been confirmed.

The day view drops the department grouping, and its headings no longer open anything — you are already inside a week. Switch back to Weeks for the overview.

What you can do from here

This view is for reading the plan, not editing it. Creating, confirming, un-confirming, extending and deleting bookings all happen on Capacity by project, where a booking belongs to a role.

Declare a need is the exception, and it sits above the grid on both views. It needs the Resourcing Approver role; without it the button is visible but greyed out, and says so on hover.

Reading this view needs nothing beyond the Resourcing Manager role that gets you onto the page. Like the rest of Resourcing, it is desktop only.

Working with the keyboard

The grid behaves as a spreadsheet does: arrow keys move between cells and stop at the edges, Home and End jump to the ends of a row, and Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End jump to the first and last cell.

Every meter announces the person, the week, the value and the stateAnna Kowalska, week 32: 118% of capacity, overallocated. The word a sighted planner reads from the colour is in the text for everyone else.

A week heading is a real control, reachable by keyboard and named for what it does — Expand W32 into days. In the Days view the period announced is the day itself — Mon 3 Aug — and a day with no scheduled hours announces as that, rather than passing as an empty cell.

Example use cases

  • Find who has room next month without keeping a bench list — the empty tracks are the answer.
  • Catch someone booked to 100% in a week they are already half on holiday, before the delivery date is promised.
  • Check that a part-timer is not quietly booked as though they worked a full week.
  • Scan a department's average across the quarter to see whether it is carrying too much or too little.
  • Spot the person whose full week is three projects deep and decide which one moves.
  • See which roles are still open, and from which week, alongside the people who might fill them.
  • Open a red week into days to find that the leave and the booking collide on Tuesday and Wednesday only.

Connection map

Derived fromPart ofRefers toFulfilsUses upPlanned vs actual
Documented hereDocumented elsewhere
job-size sizes capacity. project needs role. role drawn from position. role declares demand. booking fills role. booking books person. absence reduces capacity. booking consumes capacity. bench derived from capacity. booking planned vs actual time-entry.sizesneedsdrawn fromdeclaresfillsbooksreducesconsumesderived fromplanned vs actualJJob Size — The employment capacity an agreement commits to, in hours and minutes per week. The FTE percentage is calculated from it rather than entered: someone whose hours per week equal their job size is full-time.Job SizeCCapacity — A person's contracted week, less absence. Bookings are measured against their own contracted week, so 20 hours fills 83% of a 0.6 FTE and not 50%.CapacityPProject — The core organizational unit for a business initiative, client engagement or internal work. Everything tracked — time, cost, invoicing, profitability — hangs off one.ProjectRRole — One job to be done on a project. It may be open, partly filled, filled or over-filled, and it exists whether or not anyone is booked on it.RolePPosition — The catalogue of job titles a project role is drawn from.PositionDDemand — What a role needs, stated apart from who is doing it. Stored as one slot per full-time person, so 2.5 people is three slots. A role with none declared is treated as one full-time person.DemandBBooking — One person committed to one role for a stretch of weeks, at a percentage of their time. A booking is a plan, not a record of work done.BookingPPerson — An employee. The central record the rest of the workforce data hangs off — profile, documents, leave, benefits, rates.PersonAAbsence — Approved time off. It removes hours from a person's week before any booking is counted against it.AbsenceTThe bench — Everyone with room left in the period on screen, most free first. Derived from capacity on every period change; never a list anyone maintains.The benchTTime entry — What actually happened — work time logged against a project.Time entry