Planning staff capacity week by week
How an accounting firm plans its people's capacity across the coming weeks, spots overcommitment early, and treats weeks shown as "not set".
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Accountants & audit firms in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Every firm knows its busy season is coming. Year-ends cluster, tax deadlines bunch together, and the same handful of experienced seniors are promised to three engagements in the same fortnight. The plan looked fine when each job was booked. It only falls apart when the weeks arrive.
Capacity planning is the habit of looking at those weeks before they arrive: who is available, what has been promised to whom, and where the two do not fit. It is less about software than about discipline, but a people-by-weeks view makes the gaps far harder to ignore.
Capacity versus demand
Two quantities need to be set side by side.
Capacity is the time each person can actually give to client work in a given week. It is not their contracted hours. Take out leave, study days, training, internal meetings and the administration every role carries, and what remains is the capacity worth planning with.
Demand is the time the firm has committed to clients in that week: the budgeted hours for engagements in progress, deadlines falling due, and reviews waiting for a manager or partner.
When demand exceeds capacity, something gives. Deadlines slip, reviews are rushed, or staff work late until they leave. None of those is a plan.
The people-by-weeks plan
In Achekam, WORK & DELIVERY > Capacity / Resource Planner shows a people-by-weeks capacity plan: each person down the side, the coming weeks across the top. Alongside it, Hours: Allocated vs Consumed compares each engagement's planned hours with the hours logged.
Use the two together:
- Start from the engagements. For each one due in the planning window, check the planned hours and how much of them has been used.
- Spread the remaining hours across the weeks the work will happen in, by person.
- Compare each person's committed hours per week with their capacity.
- Mark every week where a person is committed beyond capacity.
Where the planner shows a person overcommitted in a week, that is a decision waiting to be made, not a fact to be accepted.
Weeks shown as "not set"
A week for which nobody has recorded capacity shows as "not set". This label deserves attention, because the natural reading is wrong. "Not set" does not mean available. It means nobody has said.
That person may be on leave, writing an exam, seconded to a client or simply not yet planned. Before assigning work into a "not set" week, confirm it. Better still, make filling in capacity part of the routine: whoever owns the plan records each person's capacity for the next several weeks, including reduced weeks, so that "not set" becomes rare and always means "check before you book".
Leave, meetings and the busy season
The weeks that break a plan are usually predictable.
Leave. Approved leave should reduce capacity in the plan as soon as it is approved, not when the person is already away. Record it as reduced capacity yourself rather than assuming another screen will carry it across.
Meetings and internal work. Staff can create meetings in HOME > Calendar, linked to a client or engagement, and invite colleagues. A meeting about a restricted client shows only as "busy" to people who are not on that client's access list. When planning, remember that a heavy calendar week is a light client-work week, even if the plan shows the hours as free.
The busy season. In the weeks before common year-ends and filing deadlines, capacity is at its tightest. Plan those weeks first, earliest, and with the most care. Move work that can be done earlier, such as planning, permanent file updates and interim procedures, out of the peak.
Having enough of the right people on a job is a quality question, not only a scheduling one. The IAASB's description of ISA 220 (Revised) sets out the engagement partner's and engagement team's responsibilities for managing quality on an audit of financial statements.
Rebalancing work
Once the plan shows a problem, there are only a few levers, and each has a cost:
| Lever | When it works | The cost |
|---|---|---|
| Move work to another week | The deadline allows it | Pressure moves elsewhere |
| Move work to another person | Someone suitable has capacity | A handover and learning time |
| Agree a later date with the client | The client's own deadline allows it | A conversation, sometimes an unhappy one |
| Bring in extra help | The overload is real and short | Fees to a contractor or overtime |
| Decline or defer new work | The overload is structural | Lost revenue now, better work later |
The work desks show what is really happening as the weeks unfold. Each professional has a My Work list and a Professional Inbox, and the Supervision, Manager and Partner desks show their level's review queue, returned work and risks. A review queue that keeps growing on one manager is a capacity problem even if their timesheet looks normal.
The Team Activity page gives a further check: it shows each person's recorded and captured time against their working hours and the work due on them next, stated as facts about the work rather than a judgement of the person. It is a good place to confirm that the plan matches reality. Over a longer period, the utilisation reports tell you whether capacity was set realistically; see measuring staff utilisation honestly. And when one engagement is eating more than its share, tracking audit hours against budget shows how to catch it during fieldwork.
A weekly planning routine
- Update capacity for every person for the coming weeks, including leave and training.
- Replace every "not set" in the next month with a real figure.
- Check each person's committed hours against capacity.
- Decide what to do about each overcommitted week, and tell the people affected.
- Look at review queues on the Manager and Partner desks for hidden overload.
Choose one person to own the plan, give them half an hour every week to update it, and make the first item of the weekly management meeting the weeks where it does not fit.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
