Manage Team (Advanced): Plan the team capacity

Assessing the time allocated for a job versus the actual time spent is crucial for maintaining efficiency and profitability, especially in larger firms. This article will guide you through the TaxDome features designed to help you accurately plan and manage your team's capacity.

Planning the team capacity, explained

Some jobs take more time and effort; they might require more qualified team members’ attention. If you use time tracking or want to start using it, TaxDome allows you to plan and analyze the team capacity using the following concepts:

• Time budget: The time allocated for a particular job. If you are a firm owner, you can restrict other team members from accessing and changing it.
• Tracked time: All time entries linked to the job summed up.
• Time variance: The difference between time budget and tracked time. 
• Budget time spent: The amount of tracked time related to the time budget (in %).

For example, if the time budget is 2 hours and the tracked time is 1 hour, the time variance will be 1 hour, and the Budget time spent will be 50%.

In general, the whole process of planning the team capacity is the following:

1. When the job is created, the responsible person sets the time budget for it (this could be done beforehand by using job templates)

2. Team members track time while working on their assigned jobs. Time entries for one job are automatically summed up.

3. Once the job is finished, the responsible person can see and analyze the difference between time planned and time spent. 

In TaxDome, you can use this feature to:

• Make the estimated budget visible and use it to distribute jobs among the team members. For example, you might want to assign a more time-consuming and important job to a more experienced team member and backward. 
• Decide to whom to assign a job, considering each team member's current workload expressed in the job budget hours or in the time variance.
• Analyze how your team members performed over a past period and whether anyone was overloaded.

Before you start

Before you start planning the team capacity, you should consider the following:

• Make sure all team members use time entries while working on jobs: if your employees don't track time while working on jobs, you can only set the time budget in hours but not analyze the actual time spent or build reports. Capacity planning is most effective if everyone in the team tracks time right from the job card. Or, they can link time entries to jobs manually.

• Set up access rights: By default, only the firm owner and admins can manage the time budget. However, if you want your team members to be responsible for the time budget when they create jobs or to be able to compare the allocated time with the time they already spent, you can enable a Manage time budget access right for them. To give them access to the Capacity planning dashboard in the Reporting, turn on the View reporting for them as well.

Set time budget for jobs

Setting a time budget is an essential step in the planning team's capacity because you need this data to compare and analyze. If, after analyzing, you understand that time variance is usually big, you can change the time budget for future jobs. 

A time budget can be set at any time in one of the following ways:

• From the job card: Open the job card and fill in the Time budget field in hours and minutes.

• From the job list: Go to Workflow > Jobs and edit the Time budget column value right in the table. If you don't see the column, check if it's hidden.

• From the job template.  It's a good idea to set the time budget right in the job template for common jobs and those created in accordance with the schedule. This way, it will be automatically filled out for all new jobs created with this template.

Analyze time variance

Once the job has its time budget set and time entries linked, it is time to analyze the time variance. There are different ways to do this:

• In the job card (for one job)
• In the jobs list (for multiple jobs)
• In the pipeline (for jobs that are in progress)
• On the Capacity planning dashboard (for multiple jobs over a period of time)

Time variance displayed in the job card

You can always see time variance right inside the job card in the Time entries section.

Time variance displayed in the jobs list

You can see the time variance for multiple jobs in the job list, which can be accessed by going to  Workflow > Jobs from the left sidebar menu. Here, you have columns showing time budget, tracked time, time variance and budget time spent and matching filters. This is the best way to analyze time variance on the go when you want to check to whom to assign a new job or to identify active jobs that are out of budget and take action if needed.

For example, if you want to find all active jobs where Tracked time significantly exceeds the Time budget and understand what's the reason, filter jobs by 'Budget time spent > 100'. 

Time variance displayed in the pipeline

Another way to see time variance is to show the time budget data on job cards in the pipeline. This could be useful for identifying issues while the team is working on jobs. This  could be enabled in the pipeline settings for each pipeline individually.

Time variance on the capacity dashboard

Capacity planning pre-built dashboard is a great tool for analyzing time variance over a past period of time. You'll be able to see who was overloaded or who took more or less responsibility than the others. To see the dashboard, go to Reporting > Dashboards and select Capacity Planning.