Utilization Calculations

What is Utilization?

Utilization is a measure of how effectively an organization uses its billable resources over time. It's generally a key indicator to determine billings, profitability, employee compensation, and capacity required to deliver pipeline opportunities. Utilization reporting requirements vary greatly between different organizations.

PSA calculates utilization for billing purposes as a percentage: the number of billable hours available in a given time period divided by the number of hours resources have billed. Utilization calculations for the purposes of employee compensation also consider time credited hours (for example, time spent on training). The work calendarA calendar that defines the working days, hours and public holidays for a resource, region, practice or group. determines the hours for each working week for the RPGAbbreviation of region, practice, group. and resources to be included in utilization calculations.Timecards and work calendars are used to calculate utilization for a resource.

You can run utilization reports on a regionA level of hierarchy used in PSA to which other objects belong such as resources, opportunities and projects., practiceA level of hierarchy used in PSA to which other objects belong such as resources, opportunities and projects., groupA level of hierarchy used in PSA to which other objects belong such as resources, opportunities and projects. or resourceA contact that works on a project..

How does it Help my Professional Services Business?

You can use the utilization fields in a RPG, projectA collection of activities and related items to be managed over a defined time range, such as timecards, expenses, milestones and budgets. or resource to monitor compliance of time booked against time scheduled. The result of utilization calculations help explain operational realities and why variances have occurred. For instance:

About Utilization Calculations

Whenever you calculate utilization, either historical or scheduled, for an RPG or resource, PSA creates the following records in your organizationA deployment of the Salesforce/FinancialForce applications with a defined set of licensed users. Your organization includes all of your data and applications, and is separate from all other organizations.:

These records are available to add as related lists on the RPG or resource. Actual utilization percentages and calculation fields are shown in the fields of the RPG record, usually in the Utilization section—see "Region, Practice and Group Fields".

When you change the target utilization for a resource, a resource change record is created to track when the change was made and allow accurate utilization processing to take place.

To include the hours for a resource in utilization processing:

Your administrator can refine the utilization processing strategy for your organization—see "Utilization Settings".

You can compare target, scheduled and actual utilization back through time and analyze the root causes of performance problems. You can create dashboards in Salesforce to analyze variance by comparing the various scheduled and actual utilization fields for a particular resourceA contact that works on a project., resource role, projectA collection of activities and related items to be managed over a defined time range, such as timecards, expenses, milestones and budgets., regionA level of hierarchy used in PSA to which other objects belong such as resources, opportunities and projects., practiceA level of hierarchy used in PSA to which other objects belong such as resources, opportunities and projects. or groupA level of hierarchy used in PSA to which other objects belong such as resources, opportunities and projects. across your entire organization. For information about analyzing utilization calculations, see "About Utilization Calculations".

Previous Releases and Upgrading to Newer Calculation Methods

In previous releases utilization calculation worked in different ways. In some cases you can keep an older calculation method. For detailed information about utilization calculations in older releases, see the documentation for that release.

If you used an older calculation method in a previous release, your administrator can configure PSA to use the newer calculation method. See "Utilization Settings".

Warning
We recommend moving to the newer calculation method as soon as possible. Once you move to the new calculation method you should not change back to the older method.

Related Tasks

Calculating Utilization

Setting up Utilization

Recalculating Utilization

Reference Materials

Utilization Calculation Fields

Utilization Calculator Fields

Utilization Settings

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