Capacity planning and resource management software for services teams
CrmLeaf shows who is free, who is overbooked and when, by comparing committed work with the hours each person can actually deliver after leave, holidays and shifts. Plan, allocate and schedule resources from the same system that holds your projects, time and timesheets.
- From $9/user/month
- Free trial
- Utilization views are an add-on
- What it is
- Capacity planning, resource planning, allocation and scheduling inside CrmLeaf, a professional services automation (PSA) platform.
- Best for
- Agencies, consultancies and other services teams that sell people's time.
- Four views
- Availability, Capacity, Workload and Timeline.
- Inputs
- Task estimates, logged time, shifts and rosters, holidays and weekly offs, approved leave.
- Core (all plans)
- Projects, tasks, time tracking, timesheets, shifts, leave calendar.
- Add-on
- Resource Utilization (Availability, Capacity, Workload, Timeline views). An administrator enables it.
- Not included
- A stored utilization KPI or target, employee cost rates, a project profitability report.
- Pricing
- From $9/user/month. Add-on availability depends on your plan.
How it works
How do you plan capacity for a services team? Four steps
- 1
Know your supply
Shifts, rosters, holidays and approved leave set how many hours each person can deliver.
- 2
Size your demand
Task estimates on projects show how much work is committed, and when.
- 3
Compare and rebalance
Capacity and Workload views show headroom and overload. Reassign tasks or move dates.
- 4
Check against actuals
Logged hours and approved timesheets show where the plan drifted. Adjust the next cycle.
How do you see who is free and who is overbooked?
Staffing is the constraint in a services business. Before you promise a delivery date, you need to know who has room, how much a team can absorb, and who is already carrying too much. CrmLeaf answers this with four views that all read the same records.
Availability shows who is free to take work. Capacity shows how much a person or team can take on. Workload shows how much is already assigned. Timeline shows how commitments fall across a period, so you can spot a pile-up in one week rather than only a total.
Because the views are derived, reassigning a task or approving leave changes the picture straight away. Nobody updates a separate planning file.
Built in (add-on)
- Resource Utilization add-on: Availability, Capacity, Workload and Timeline views
- Filter down to the team you are planning
- Spot concentrations of work in the same week
- Reassign tasks or move dates, then re-open the view to confirm
- Read-only reporting layer: no extra data entry
How do you forecast demand from deals and projects?
Capacity only helps if you look at it before the work lands. CrmLeaf keeps the deal, the project, the tasks and the time in one system, so the staffing conversation can start at the deal stage instead of after the contract is signed.
A typical flow runs deal → resource planning → project → tasks → time → reporting. When a deal is likely to close, check the Availability lens for the weeks in question, then the Capacity lens for the candidate teams, and assign to the team with headroom. Task estimates on the projects already running are what tell the views how much is committed.
The views read task estimates, logged time, shifts, leave and holidays. They do not read deal values or pipeline probabilities directly, so treat deal-stage planning as a manual check against the lenses.
What this covers
- Deals, projects, tasks and time in one system
- Project members and task estimates feed committed work
- Check Availability and Capacity before committing a date
- Resource Allocation Reports show who is booked on what
- Pipeline-weighted demand is not computed automatically
How do you match the right skills to the work?
Free hours are only useful if they belong to the right person. If every free hour is junior and the project needs a senior specialist, a headcount total misleads you.
Skill management maps skills, certifications and proficiency levels to each team member. You can search by skill and availability together, run gap analysis against project demand, and staff people whose skills fit the brief.
Skill matching
- Skills, certifications and proficiency levels per person
- Search by skill and availability
- Gap analysis against project demand
- Skill data feeds staffing decisions, not only HR records
How do you account for leave, holidays and shifts?
A consultant on approved leave should not be offered as available, and a part-time roster should not be counted as a full week. CrmLeaf builds available time from the schedules and leave records you already keep.
Shifts and rosters define working hours per person. Holidays and weekly offs remove non-working days. The leave calendar takes approved leave out of availability and flags clashes when someone applies. These are Core features, available on every plan.
If someone on leave still appears free, the usual cause is a leave application that was not recorded or not approved.
Built in (Core)
- Shifts and rosters (Core)
- Holiday calendar and weekly offs (Core)
- Leave calendar with clash checks (Core)
- Approved leave removed from availability
- Part-time rosters respected
How do you compare planned hours with logged hours?
Plans drift. The way to keep capacity honest is to compare what was estimated with what was actually logged, by person, project and period.
Time tracking (timer or manual entry where the project allows it) and weekly timesheets with approval are Core, so reviewed hours are available to everyone. The Time Log Report shows billable and non-billable hours by person, project and period. Task estimates give the planned side, and Resource Allocation Reports show who is booked on what.
Weekly timesheet approval means the figures you compare are approved effort, not raw entry. That is what makes a utilization number credible.
Planned vs actual
- Timer and manual time entry (Core)
- Weekly timesheets with approval (Core)
- Billable vs non-billable hours by person, project and period
- Resource Allocation Reports for booked time
- Task estimates as the planned baseline
How do you measure resource utilization?
Resource utilization is the share of available time spent on productive, usually billable, work. It needs two inputs: hours worked and hours available.
CrmLeaf holds both. Approved billable and non-billable hours come from time tracking and the Time Log Report. Available time comes from shifts, leave and holidays. The Utilisation Reports page covers the four lenses plus a Work Summary report.
Honest scope: utilization is not published as a single stored figure, and there is no configurable utilization target. Teams typically derive the ratio from exported report data. CrmLeaf also holds no employee cost rate per hour and ships no project profitability report, so treat these views as a capacity and workload picture, not a margin one.
What is and is not included
- Billable vs non-billable hours (Time Log Report)
- Available time from shifts, leave and holidays
- Export report data to calculate your own ratio
- No stored utilization KPI or target
- No cost-rate or margin view
Comparison
Is capacity planning software better than a spreadsheet?
Spreadsheets are fine for a five-person team with one project. The trouble starts when leave, estimates and logged time live in other tools and every change has to be copied across by hand.
| Question | Spreadsheet | CrmLeaf |
|---|---|---|
| Who is free this week | Read rows and cells by hand, then guess | Availability view built from shifts, leave and holidays (add-on) |
| Approved leave and holidays | Typed in separately, easily stale | Taken from the leave calendar and holiday setup |
| Reassigning a task | Edit the task tool, then edit the sheet | Reassign once; the views update |
| Planned vs logged hours | Paste a time export next to the plan | Estimates and approved timesheets live in the same system |
| Matching skills | A separate skills tab, if anyone keeps it | Skill search combined with availability |
| Where a spreadsheet still wins | Free-form what-if modelling and any formula you like | Utilization ratio is derived from exported data, with no stored KPI |
FAQ
Common questions about capacity planning in CrmLeaf
Capacity planning software compares the work a team has committed to with the hours the team can actually deliver, after leave, holidays and shifts. It shows who is free, who is overbooked and when, so you can accept work, hire or reassign before a deadline slips.
Related
Explore further
Staff from data, not from memory
Start a free trial, add your team's shifts and leave, and see who has room next week. Or book a demo and we will walk through your own staffing questions.