Most teams plan capacity in a tangled spreadsheet that never actually flags the problem. People get booked onto projects, the plan looks fine, and a month in two people are underwater while someone else has been quietly under-booked the whole time — and you find out too late to fix it. The Team Capacity & Utilization Planner closes that gap: book each person onto projects, and it nets every assignment against their available hours and tells you, for every person and every month, exactly who is over-allocated and who has capacity to spare.
It’s a resource and utilization planner built as a workbook you own — one .xlsx that works in Excel and LibreOffice, plus a one-click Google Sheets copy. A blank grid lets you list assignments; this one does the utilization math, flags the over-allocation, and shows you the month your team runs tight.
See who’s over-allocated — before you say yes
The Capacity & Utilization tab is the heart of the planner. For every person and every month across a six-month horizon, it divides their booked hours by the available hours you set and shows the result as a utilization percentage — with a flag a blank grid can’t give you:
- Over — booked past 100%. Someone’s underwater; the hours aren’t there.
- Low — under your target. Real room, and where the next project should go first.
- OK — productively booked, with a little slack.
Every flag is a plain word, not just a color, so the meaning survives a grayscale printout and a glance alike.
Answer “can we take this on” from the numbers
Book a prospective project and read the Overview: team utilization by month against your target, how many people are over-allocated, and the spare capacity you actually have. It even surfaces the first month your team hits target — the point you’re effectively full. If the answer is “we have the room,” you say yes with confidence. If it’s “only if we move two things,” you know the two things. If it’s “not without help,” you found that out before the client did.
What’s in the capacity planner
A five-tab workbook — Read Me, Setup & Team, Assignments, Capacity & Utilization, and Overview — plus four PDF guides: a Start Here guide on what utilization really means, a Utilization & Capacity guide that reads the worked example, a Resourcing Playbook for turning the plan into decisions, and a printable capacity planner for the wall. A fictional studio is pre-loaded so it makes sense the moment you open it — overwrite it with your own team.
Excel, Google Sheets, or LibreOffice — your choice
The .xlsx opens natively in Microsoft Excel and LibreOffice Calc. Prefer Google Sheets? The bundle includes a “Make a copy” link — click it and the whole workbook lands in your Drive, every dropdown, formula, and color already set up. No importing, nothing to rebuild.
Own it, don’t rent it
This is a file you own outright — no per-seat fee, no monthly bill, no resource-management app holding your team’s workload on their server. It sits right where you need it: more than a blank spreadsheet, without the lock-in of software. Buy it once, and plan every cycle with it.
New to capacity planning? Try the free single-month team load checker first — a one-page taste of the method before you step up to the full six-month planner.
A planning tool — not payroll or billing software, and not HR, tax, or legal advice. Utilization here is a planning figure (booked hours ÷ the available hours you set), not a timesheet or an invoice. The example team, projects, and bookings are fictional and illustrative.
