Agency Capacity Planning: A Worksheet for Hours by Role

Start with supply. For each role, work down these steps:

1. Count headcount in the role, using fractions for part-time or partly allocated people.
2. Multiply by working days in the month, and subtract holidays and planned paid time off.
3. Convert to hours, using the hours in your actual working day.
4. Subtract non-billable time: internal meetings, admin, training, and business development.
5. The result is billable capacity, in hours.

For example, say a designer works 20 days in a month, with 2 days of planned time off, and spends roughly 1.5 hours a day on internal meetings and admin. That leaves 18 working days, and at 8 hours a day and 1.5 non-billable hours, about 117 billable hours. Use your own numbers; the point is to reach billable hours, not paid hours. For utilization targets to compare against, see resource utilization benchmarks for professional services.

List every project and, for each, the hours it needs from each role in each month. Split demand into three tiers so you don't treat hopeful deals as certain:

• Signed: contracted work with a start date.
• Likely: proposals verbally accepted or in final negotiation.
• Possible: earlier-stage pipeline, counted at a fraction of its hours.

Use your own history to estimate hours. If your last three brand identity projects took 90, 110 and 100 hours of design time, plan a new one at about 100 and note the range. Retainers are easier: use the hours in the agreement, then check actuals monthly, because retainer clients often use more or less than you sold.

Keep the demand list in the same sheet as the supply block, with one row per project and one column per month for each role.

Subtract demand from supply for each role and month. A negative number means you're short. Set a comfort band, since running at full load leaves no room for rework or a sick day. Say you want billable load at no more than 85 percent of capacity: any month above that is in the red zone.

Then use a decision rule for each gap:

• Short for one month: shift start dates, borrow hours from a role with slack, or use a freelancer.
• Short for three or more months: begin hiring, because recruiting and onboarding take longer than the gap lasts.
• Long slack: move up internal projects, offer added value to clients, or pause hiring.

Show the sheet to the people who sell. If they can see that the design team is full in October, they'll quote November instead of promising October.

A spreadsheet works while you have a small number of roles and projects. When you're manually updating dozens of rows every week, or people need to see their own allocations, move to a tool that shows workload by person and lets you drag work between weeks. Monday.com and Asana both offer workload views and can tie hours to projects and client budgets.

Before you switch, be sure your spreadsheet logic is right, since a tool will only make wrong assumptions faster. Compare the options in this project tool comparison, and for the underlying formula see capacity planning for service operations.

Check for these:

• Counting paid hours as billable hours, which overstates supply.
• Planning by team total instead of by role, which hides bottlenecks.
• Treating pipeline as signed work, or ignoring it completely.
• Never updating estimates with actual hours, so the plan drifts from reality.
• Forgetting that new hires and new clients take extra time in their first weeks.

Review the plan every two weeks for the next three months, and monthly for the following nine. When you're deciding whether a gap is worth a hire, the hiring process template helps you move quickly, and the contract renewal tracking sheet tells you when retainer demand may change. For multiple projects competing for the same people, project portfolio management for resource allocation is the next step.