Overview
Preparing a Utilization Report
Personalizing a Utilization Report
How To Read a Utilization Report
Definitions
Overview
If you utilize 100% of your employees’ capacity, there’s a high probability your employees will burn out. However, you don't want to give them too little work because that would waste your budget. To be successful and profitable, you should strive to assign tasks optimally.
Measuring your firm’s utilization rate is key to finding this balance. That's why BigTime Foresight offers the option to create a utilization report.
This article will explain the ins and outs of utilization reports in Foresight.
Preparing a Utilization Report
To open a Utilization Report from BigTime, click the RESOURCING navigation tab and then click UTILIZATION REPORT. This will open the Utilization Report window in Foresight.
If you’re already in Foresight, navigate to your main navigation sidebar and click REPORTS. In the dropdown menu that appears, click UTILIZATION.
Next, select the date range for which you want to download data.
Then, click the CLOCK icon to specify what assignments you would like to include in the data. You can select from ACTIVE, RESERVED, or DRAFTS. You can also pick all of them if you need to.
The chart is divided into weeks and months. To switch between these views, click the VIEW field.
You can filter data according to people or project attributes. To do so, click on the search bar at the top of your screen and type the required filters. Go to the article to learn more about filtering in Foresight.
Finally, click PREPARE REPORT once you’ve configured all your report settings.
Personalizing a Utilization Report
To create a personalized utilization report, click the CREATE DETAILED REPORT button and select the data you are interested in. Once you generate this report, you can use your last preferences as a template.
Just so you know, reports generated this way are only available for the accounts in which they were created.
How To Read a Utilization Report
You’ll see a bar graph at the top of the screen illustrating your employees’ capacity compared to their tracked hours. It will show capacity as a dark green border and performance in light green filling the border.
When you hover over each of the bars on the graph, you will find information on how the data for that bar was calculated.
Scrolling down, you will see a table with more detailed data. In the upper right corner, you will find a button to save the table to a file.
The tiles at the top of the report page show the data used to calculate your employees’ utilization. Below, we’ll define these data types.
Definitions
Assignment: Work planned for a specific individual in a project, set by the proper manager.
Billable: The amount of time spent on work that you can charge a client for.
Contract capacity: The maximum number of hours an employee can work in a given period. It does not include time off, absences, and public holidays.
Contract Utilization: Work tracked by an employee that can be billed to a client, divided by the employee's contract capacity.
Non-Billable: Usually refers to the amount of time spent working that you cannot charge the client for.
Scheduled: This refers to planned items such as utilization, overheads, margin, work, budget, etc. Their value may differ from the "not settled" or "settled" values.
Time off: Absences requested by an employee, which can have different statuses.
Tracked: Usually refers to the recorded or logged time of a person's work, encompassing billable and non-billable projects, expressed in minutes, hours, and full-time equivalent (FTE).
Utilization: The percentage of employee capacity that is allocated to projects. Tracked work by an employee that can be billed to a client, divided by the employee's capacity.
If there are other terms you don’t understand that aren’t defined above, see the Foresight Glossary for more details.