Last updated November 6, 2026
A capacity planning template lists each person's available hours for the week beside the hours already booked to projects, and subtracts one from the other. Available hours are contract hours minus leave, public holidays and a fixed allowance for internal work. A positive result means room. A negative result means somebody is overbooked.
The capacity planning template
The capacity planning template has one row per person and one sheet, or block, per week. Here's an invented five-person practice in a single week:
| Person | Contract | Time off | Internal | Available | Booked | Left | Load |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anna | 40 | 0 | 6 | 34 | 30 | 4 | 88% |
| Ben | 40 | 16 | 6 | 18 | 24 | −6 | 133% |
| Carla | 40 | 0 | 4 | 36 | 28 | 8 | 78% |
| Dev | 24 | 0 | 2 | 22 | 22 | 0 | 100% |
| Elin | 40 | 0 | 20 | 20 | 12 | 8 | 60% |
| Team | 184 | 16 | 38 | 130 | 116 | 14 | 89% |
What each column means:
- Contract: the hours the person is paid to work that week.
- Time off: approved leave and public holidays, in hours. A time off tracker can feed this column.
- Internal: a fixed allowance for meetings, admin, sales and training. Set it per person, because a director's differs from a junior's.
- Available:
Contract − Time off − Internal. - Booked: project hours already promised for that week, in hours rather than "Ben's on that job".
- Left:
Available − Booked. - Load:
Booked ÷ Available.
Read the rows before the total. The team row says 14 hours are free and the load is a comfortable 89%. Ben's row says he's 6 hours over in a week when he's away for two days. A team total hides exactly the overbooking you built the sheet to find. Here, the answer is to move 6 hours of Ben's work to Carla, if Carla can do it.
How do you plan capacity week by week?
To plan capacity week by week, copy the block forward for at least four weeks and summarise each week in one line, keeping confirmed and tentative work apart. Mixing them is how a pipeline turns into a promise you can't keep.
| Week | Available | Confirmed | Tentative | Left if it all lands |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 130 | 116 | 0 | 14 |
| 2 | 146 | 128 | 12 | 6 |
| 3 | 146 | 96 | 40 | 10 |
| 4 | 138 | 60 | 60 | 18 |
Now use it. An enquiry arrives for 30 hours of work in week 3. If the tentative 40 hours land, you have 10 left and you're 20 short. If they don't, you have 50 free. So the real decision is which job you'd rather have, and whether either can start in week 4. That's a much better conversation than "we look quite busy in a few weeks".
Far-off weeks always look emptier than they are, because bookings arrive late. Week 4 shows 60 confirmed hours today, and that doesn't mean 78 hours are free in any sense you can rely on yet. Treat the last column with more suspicion the further out it goes.
How much capacity should you leave unbooked?
Leave enough capacity unbooked to absorb your usual overrun, and measure that overrun from your own jobs rather than from someone else's target.
Here's an invented sum. Over the last eight weeks, this practice booked 900 hours and the work took 990, a 10% overrun. With 130 hours available, the most it should book is about 118, because 118 × 1.10 is roughly 130. Week 1's 116 fits, just. Week 2's 128 confirmed hours against 146 available fits as well, but the 12 tentative hours would take it to 140, past the 133 or so that's safe.
To run this sum you need a record of actual hours per job. Without one, plan to a figure you can defend, and revisit it once you have data. The guides to budget hours vs actual hours and the team timesheet template cover how to collect it.
Is capacity planning the same as utilisation?
Capacity planning isn't the same as utilisation: capacity planning looks forward and utilisation looks back. A capacity plan asks whether the hours you've promised next week will fit. Utilisation asks what share of last month's hours were billable. Load in this template is a plan, and it can sit at 90% while billable utilisation turns out far lower, because booked hours can include non-billable project work. The guide to utilisation vs billable hours goes through that measure, and resource planning for service teams covers choosing who takes which work.
What makes a capacity plan go wrong?
A capacity plan usually goes wrong because it treats hours as more interchangeable, or more current, than they are.
- Hours aren't all the same hours. Carla's 8 free hours don't help if the overflow is structural work only Ben can do. Add a skill column, or plan specialists separately.
- Directors at 40 hours. Elin's 20-hour internal allowance is the difference between a plan that works and one where every job waits on her.
- Bookings in whole people. "Ben's on the Riverside job this week" can't be added up. Ask for hours, even rough ones.
- Nobody owns it. A plan that three people update occasionally is wrong within a fortnight. Give it to one person, for a fixed slot each week.
- Leave arrives late. Check the leave log before the weekly update, not after it.
Planning capacity alongside ERPFlow
ERPFlow has no capacity planning. It doesn't total a person's available hours, set them against bookings or show who is overbooked, so this template runs in a spreadsheet.
Some of its inputs are in ERPFlow. A person's staff record has a Calendar tab, by month or week, showing their bookable hours, bookings, time off and public holidays. Vacations shows who is away on a team calendar, and the request log can be exported as CSV. In Projects, cards carry assignees and deadlines, which help when you're working out who has promised what, though a card holds no estimate of hours to come.
One word to watch: a "booking" in ERPFlow is an appointment made through a booking page. For trades that sell appointments, that really is their calendar. The Booked column in this template means project hours promised, and those you'd enter yourself.