Overview
Entering Availability Report
Preparing Availability Report
Definitions
Overview
You must plan your employees’ work schedules as efficiently as possible to achieve success and stay within your budget. Checking in periodically on your team members’ availability is crucial to making the right decisions about assignments and utilization. In BigTime Foresight, you can easily check your employees’ availability by creating an availability report. This kind of report is a vital tool for controlling, predicting, and restructuring your firm’s resource planning strategy.
Entering Availability Report
To open the Availability Report window from BigTime, click the RESOURCING navigation tab and then click AVAILABILITY REPORT.
If you’re already in Foresight, you can get to the same location by clicking the REPORTS sidebar tab and then clicking AVAILABILITY.
Note that only those with management permissions can create availability reports. If you have any terminology questions, navigate to the Definitions section of this article or look at the Foresight Glossary.
Preparing Availability Report
First, click the CALENDAR fields at the top left of your screen to select the date range for which you want to download data. Then, use the VIEW field to set a view type. There are two available view options: per month and week.
In the settings, you will also find a very important option: letting you specify the employees you want to see in your report based on their availability percentage. For example, if you put "60" in this field, you’ll only see employees whose availability is sixty percent or higher in your report.
Note that the percentage in this field represents availability by month, not by week. You can also filter by People and Project attributes. After clicking the PREPARE REPORT button, you’ll be provided with the key data. You’ll see a bar graph and a table displaying the data you elected to see in your report. You can export this data as a CSV or an XLSX file by clicking the EXPORT DATA button at the top of your report table.
Definitions
Behind the data in your report are specific, hidden calculations. Below are the main parameters and how they were calculated. We’ve defined a few terms you’ll encounter when creating an Availability Report and reading about these parameters.
| If you have questions on any terms not described below, look at the Foresight Glossary. |
Available capacity: In an Availability report, this parameter answers the question of how many hours you can bill a client for. It pulls from the people on your list and a given period of your choosing. It only shows people who are 100 percent available in a given period you set. The data is based on assignments. To appear in this report, a person must have a minimum level of availability in at least one of the filtered months. You can set this level of minimum availability by adjusting the specified parameter.
Capacity: The maximum amount of work that can be completed in a given period. It’s calculated by multiplying the number of working hours a day by the number of working days in a selected period.
Contractor: A person with an hourly salary based on the number of hours they log.
Employee (under Contract Type): A person with a fixed monthly salary regardless of the number of logged hours. The employee contract type includes both employees and B2B contractors.