Utilization report

Scoro’s utilization report shows how your employees are spending their work time. You can see exactly how much of your team’s time has been used, planned, or left unscheduled, allowing you to:

• See who is overworked or underutilized and take action to rebalance their workloads
• Spot who is available and forecast capacity, so you can plan how much work your team can take on before committing to a project timeline
• Make hiring decisions or outsource the work if your team’s utilization is maximized and redistribution isn’t possible
• Inform your sales team when your team’s utilization is low to secure new projects and keep your team members occupied
• Support invoicing and billing processes by tracking billable hours for clients and projects.

You’ll find this report under Reports > Work > Utilization report.

This article will show you how to customize your utilization report view, along with some use case examples, so you can get exactly the insights you need.

1. Plan availability

The utilization report is available for the following Scoro plans:

• Current plans: Growth, Performance, Enterprise
• Legacy plans: Pro, Ultimate

For more information about all Scoro plans, see our Plans & Pricing page.

2. Managing access to the utilization report

Access to the utilization report is controlled by permission sets. To enable this report for a permission set:

1. Go to Settings > Administration > Permission sets.
2. Click on Modules and actions for the permission set you want to modify.
   
3. Scroll to the Additional features section and tick the Utilization report checkbox.
   

Once the permission is enabled, users with this particular permission set will be able to access this report in the Reports module under Reports > Work > Utilization report.

3. Setting up availability settings before using the utilization report

To use the utilization report to its best advantage, we highly recommend setting up each team member’s work capacity in the Availability settings page under Settings > Work and projects > Availability. This will ensure you’ve got the complete picture of your team’s availability and accurate utilization data to plan projects and distribute work properly.

Learn more about availability settings.

4. How to read the utilization report

Scoro’s utilization report considers each employee’s overall capacity in a selected time range and compares it with booked time or already planned work.

4.1. Monitoring utilization based on bookings or planned work

You can monitor utilization either based on bookings or tasks and time entries:

• The bookings layer helps you get a better understanding of your long-term utilization forecast. You can choose between viewing all bookings or only fixed bookings.
• The tasks and time entries layer provides you with better insights into actual utilization, both retrospectively and in a shorter time frame. You can choose between viewing only time entries or both tasks and time entries:
  • The Time entries layer considers actual time entries (planned and done) and events.
  • The Tasks and time entries layer provides a broad overview of the already scheduled and done time, as well as monitors the planned time of tasks that are not scheduled yet.
    • If role assignment is enabled on your site, the utilization report will also display the total hours assigned to role placeholders within the filtered period.
    • Learn more about unscheduled planned time allocation.

4.2. Summary column and utilization grid (heatmap)

The utilization report view consists of two general parts: the summary column and the utilization grid, which includes a heatmap.

Summary column

The summary column on the left side provides a general overview of each team member’s utilization, allowing you to quickly spot who is available to take on new assignments.

Below each user’s name are various total values for the filtered time range:

• If you’re monitoring the utilization based on bookings:
  • Dark purple color – total fixed bookings 
  • Light purple color (shown only when the All bookings layer is selected) – total tentative bookings
  • Grey color – total available time
• If you’re monitoring utilization based on planned work:
  • Light turquoise color – total scheduled time
  • Yellow color (shown only when the Tasks and time entries layer is selected) – total unscheduled time (the total planned time that hasn’t been scheduled yet)
  • Grey color – total available time

You can hover over the summary bar colors to see the total values.

The red time value above the summary bar indicates the user’s backlog of remaining unscheduled time of tasks with a due date in the past. Click on that number to open the filtered task list.

Utilization grid (heatmap)

The utilization grid on the right side displays the users’ general availability levels. You can navigate between day, week, and month views. To get better and better at forecasting, compare your team members' workload for the specified time frame in days, weeks, or see how much work has been scheduled in months.

You can choose what data to display in the utilization grid, depending on which insights help you the best:

• Utilized – both the utilization hours and percentage
• Remaining – remaining hours
• Percent – utilization percentage

Depending on the layer you’ve selected for monitoring utilization, each cell displays the specific user’s utilized or remaining hours.

In the View options, you can tick the "Show utilization heatmap" checkbox to enable a progress bar-like background and color indicators for each cell, indicating how much of that period is already utilized.

Utilization heatmap legend:

• Green solid background – indicates the utilized time. The green color gets darker as the user’s availability in the given time period reduces.
• Red solid background – indicates done hours that exceed the user’s availability in the given time period.
• Red striped background – indicates scheduled hours that exceed the user’s availability in the given time period.
• Grey striped background – user is unavailable in the given time period.

To see more information about what’s occupying the team member’s time, hover over the utilized hours summary field. The time on the hovercard is grouped by projects for better clarity. You can also click on the project’s name to quickly navigate to the specific project, or click on the scheduled or done time values to open up the filtered view of the detailed work report.

4.3. Unscheduled time allocation

The Tasks and time entries layer of the utilization report also allows you to monitor the planned time of the users’ tasks that is not scheduled yet. The unscheduled time is allocated differently depending on whether the task has a due date.

To better understand the allocation, let’s say that John has a task with a planned duration of 20 hours, none of which have been scheduled yet. We’ll zoom in on a single week in the report view.

• If the task has a due date (Friday), but no start date, the total unscheduled time (20 hours) will be allocated on the due date.
  
• If the task has both a start date (Monday) and a due date (Friday), the unscheduled time will be evenly allocated across all the working days (4 hours each day).
  
• If the task only has a start date OR the task has neither a start nor a due date, no time will be allocated.
  

The allocation of unscheduled time also takes into account the users’ time-off entries and availability during national holidays:

• National holidays and all-day time off – unscheduled time is not allocated.
• Partial-day time off – unscheduled time is allocated the same way as for days with full availability. If the allocated time exceeds the user’s availability, the heatmap will indicate this with a red striped background.

For example:

• John has a task with a planned duration of 10 hours, with Monday as a start date and Friday as the due date. None of the task’s planned hours have been scheduled yet. We’ll zoom in on a single week in the report view.
• John has an all-day vacation on Monday, a 5-hour time-off on Wednesday, and Friday is a national holiday.

The unscheduled time (10 hours) is then equally allocated on the days where John has availability, with 3 hours and 20 minutes on each day. As John only has 3 hours available on Wednesday due to his partial-day time-off, the allocated hours exceed his availability, meaning he is overutilized that day.

5. Filtering the utilization report

You can also use the following filters to customize the utilization report view even further:

• Roles
• Users
• User tags
• Time range
• Projects
• Project types
• Project status
• Project tags
• Activity types
• Time – you can choose to view only billable time or total time, which includes billable and non-billable time

Pro tip! Save your favorite utilization report views as bookmarks for quicker access!