Billable Utilisation & Capacity Planner Template
This planner compares the hours you pay for with the hours that reached a client invoice, person by person. The difference between those two numbers is what sets the floor under your rate card — and in most service businesses it is far larger than the owner expects.
There are two costs per hour in any service business, and confusing them is expensive. The first is cost per paid hour: payroll divided by the hours you buy. The second is cost per billable hour: the same payroll divided only by the hours a client agreed to pay for. At fifty per cent utilisation the second number is double the first, because every unsold hour is carried by a sold one. A rate card built on the first number loses money on every project while appearing to clear its costs.
Utilisation is also easy to misread as a performance score. The people who come out worst on this sheet are often the ones who win the work, keep the client and stop projects from going wrong — none of which appears on a timesheet. Read the low numbers as a question about what that person's week is for, not as a verdict on whether they earn their salary.
The trap at the other end is treating high utilisation as the goal. Booking a team to ninety per cent removes the slack that absorbs a sick day, a late brief or a client who moves a deadline, and the overruns that follow usually cost more than the hours gained. Finmap tracks revenue against payroll as it lands, so utilisation stays a planning input rather than a number assembled once a year when something has already gone wrong.
