Resources and capacity

Create resource profiles, allocate people to projects, record time off and read the workload heatmap and bench.

Resources help you answer “can we take this on?” with hours rather than guesses. A resource profile gives someone capacity you can plan against. Allocations book part of that capacity to a project, and the workload heatmap shows both, person by person and week by week, so you can see who is overbooked before a date slips.

Key concepts#

Resource profile: What makes a person plannable: their employment type, weekly capacity and availability. A profile is either for a member of your organization or for a placeholder role.
Placeholder: A profile for a role nobody fills yet, such as “Senior backend engineer”. You can plan against it now.
Capacity: The hours a week the profile is available, before time off. Scheduled hours for a period come from the working calendar that applies to the person: their own, else their team’s, else the organization’s.
Allocation: A booking of hours a week against a project, from a start date and optionally until an end date. An allocation is a weekly rate, not a total: 20 hours for three months books 20 hours in each of those weeks.
Utilization: Booked hours as a percentage of scheduled hours.
Bench: People currently booked below their capacity.

Who can use it#

Permissions

resource.viewresource.manage

resource.view shows Resources in the sidebar and lets you read profiles, allocations, time off, the heatmap and the bench. resource.manage lets you create and change profiles, allocate people, record and decide time off, and use everything on the Staffing page.

Note

Allocation changes don’t go through approvals. Anyone with resource.manage can book anyone.

Create a resource profile#

Open Resources and select New profile
The Add someone to plan against dialog opens.
Choose who This profile is for
Choose Someone in the organization and pick the Person, or A role nobody fills yet (placeholder) and enter What the role is called. Each member can have only one profile.
Choose the Employment type
Full time, Part time, Contractor, Freelancer, External or Intern.
Set Capacity (hours a week)
Defaults to 40. Any value from 0 to 168.
Select Create profile

Read the workload heatmap#

The Workload section on Resources covers the next twelve weeks, starting today. The date range is shown at the right of the filter bar.

Choose Buckets
Daily, Weekly (the default) or Monthly. Each column is labelled with the month and day the bucket starts.
Optionally choose a Pool
Once your organization has pools, a Pool menu lets you narrow the heatmap from Everyone to one pool.
Read the rows
Each row is a person, and the name links to their profile. The Used column shows their utilization over the whole range, in red when it’s above 100%. The last row, Everyone, is the team total.
Hover over a cell for detail
For example: “2026-10-05: 32h booked of 40h · 8h free”. Time off is included when there is some, and overbooking shows as hours over.

Colour key	Meaning
Not a working period	No scheduled hours: a weekend, holiday or approved time off. It isn’t shown as availability.
Nothing booked	Working time with no allocations.
Lightly booked	Under 70% of scheduled hours booked.
Busy	70% or more, but under 100%.
Fully booked	Exactly 100%.
Over-allocated	More hours booked than scheduled.

Below the heatmap, UnitX says how many people are booked past capacity and gives the total hours booked and scheduled for the whole range.

The team row is a true total

The Everyone row is all booked hours divided by all scheduled hours. It isn’t an average of the percentages above it, because averaging would let an idle person hide someone who is overbooked.

The bench#

The Bench section lists people booked below their capacity right now. Each card shows how committed they are and their weekly capacity, for example “45% committed · 40h a week”. Check it before hiring, outsourcing or moving a date.

A person’s resource profile#

Select a name in the heatmap or a card on the bench to open the profile. It shows the weekly capacity (and says so if it’s a placeholder), plus:

Availability: Available, Partially available, Unavailable, On leave or Inactive. Next to it is the person’s total commitment, with “booked past capacity” when it’s over 100%.
The next twelve weeks: a strip of weekly cells using the same colours as the heatmap. Hover over a cell for its hours.
Allocations and Time off, described below.

Unavailable removes someone from planning

Setting availability to Unavailable takes the person out of the team heatmap and the bench, because they’re no longer capacity you can plan against.

Allocate someone to a project#

Open the profile and select Allocate to a project
Choose the Project
Choose Measured in and enter the Amount
Hours a week, or % of capacity. Whichever you choose, UnitX stores the allocation as hours a week, working a percentage out from the person’s capacity, so the two can’t drift apart. Percentages over 100 are allowed if you really mean to overbook, but over 1,000 is refused as a likely typo.
Optionally add a Role
For example, “Tech lead”.
Set From and, optionally, Until
Leave Until empty for open-ended work. The end can’t be before the start.
Select Allocate

Each allocation is listed with its project, hours a week, role and dates, and a status badge (planned, active, completed or cancelled). Select Cancel on an allocation that is no longer needed. Completed and cancelled allocations can’t be cancelled again.

Over-allocation is shown, never blocked. Booking someone past capacity is sometimes the right call; the heatmap makes sure everyone knows about it.

Record time off#

On the profile, select Record time off
Choose the Type
Vacation, Sick, Personal, Training or Holiday.
Set From and Until, and optionally a Reason
Select Record
The entry is added as pending.
Approve or Reject it
A pending entry has Approve and Reject buttons. Only approved time off reduces capacity. Until then, the forecast still counts those days as available.

Tips and limitations#

The heatmap reads allocations, not assigned work items. If someone is busy but the heatmap says they’re free, the commitment isn’t allocated yet. Allocate it so everyone planning can see it. For workload based on assigned work items, see My work and boards.
Changing a working calendar changes every forecast that uses it. See Business calendars and Work schedules and holidays.
If a person’s calendar has no working hours configured, their forecast can’t be calculated, and UnitX says so.
A heatmap covering more than 100 people is refused. Narrow it to a pool.
Skill matching isn’t available, so UnitX doesn’t suggest who should fill a role.

FAQ#

Why does someone with a full week show grey cells?

Those are days their calendar says they don’t work, or approved time off. There’s nothing to plan into them, so they’re drawn as absence rather than free capacity.

I marked someone unavailable and they vanished from the heatmap.

That’s intended. Someone unavailable isn’t capacity you can plan against, and including them would drag the team total down.

The page says nobody has a resource profile yet.

The heatmap only shows people with profiles. Select New profile to add the first one.

Does a pending time-off request reduce capacity?

No. Only approved time off does, because a pending request hasn’t been agreed yet.

Still stuck? Search the docs with ⌘K, open Help inside UnitX, or contact support.