What is workload planning?
The definition, in one sentence
A workload plan schedules a firm’s engagements (who does what, when), tracks the time actually spent and compares actuals to each engagement’s budget, during the engagement.
Unlike an Excel file, a workload plan is shared, up to date in real time and connected to timesheets: availability, overloads and budget overruns are visible while there is still time to act. It is the steering tool for the flow that runs from quote to invoice, the engine room of a firm.
Workload planning, scheduling, staffing: not the same thing
- Scheduling
- The people calendar: who works when. Necessary, but it says nothing about budgets or profitability.
- Staffing / resource allocation
- The choice of who goes on which engagement. That is a decision; the workload plan is the tool that makes it possible by showing capacity, skills and history.
- Capacity planning
- The macro view: total upcoming workload compared to team capacity. A good workload plan produces it automatically, from real engagements.
- Workload planning
- All three at once, connected to actual time and budgets: schedule engagements, see capacity, track actuals against budget throughout the year.
The same workload plan, three practices
Ten engagements per week per team member, up to four tasks a day: year-ends, VAT, interim closes, reviews. The stake: seeing who is overloaded and which deadline is coming, file by file.
Few engagements, but over weeks, in interim, inventory and final phases. The stake: placing the team on each phase and seeing the overrun during the final, not at the debrief.
Engagements spread across the month with a sold budget. The stake: charging every hour to the fixed fee and reading the margin continuously, not at invoicing.
A multi-disciplinary firm manages all three registers, and all its offices, in a single workload plan: that is how DBA (HLB France) and PKF Arsilon work.
The indicators, without jargon
The same indicator reads at four moments: budgeted (at the sale), planned (when the schedule is set), landing (actuals + remaining planned: where the engagement will end if nothing changes), then actual (at closing). The whole craft of steering is reading these numbers during the engagement, while there is still time to act.
Profitability
| Indicator | Formula | The question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Fees | Sum of the engagement’s or client’s fees. | What did we sell? |
| Budgeted work value | Budgeted hours × billing rate. | What is the promised work worth? |
| Fee coverage ratio | Budgeted work value ÷ fees × 100. Also read against planned, landing and actual. | Did we price high enough for the work promised? (aim for ~100% at the start) |
| Budget coverage ratio | Planned work value ÷ budgeted work value × 100. | Is everything that was sold actually on the schedule? |
| Gross margin (at 4 stages) | Fees − work costs (hours × cost rate), as % of fees: budgeted, planned, projected, actual. | Is the engagement making money, now and at the finish line? |
| Landing value | Actual work value + remaining planned work value. | Where will the engagement end if nothing changes? |
Capacity
| Indicator | Formula | The question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Capacity | Sum of the team’s available hours (FTE). | How many hands do we really have? |
| Utilization | Planned hours ÷ available hours. | Who is overloaded, who has slack? |
| Billable utilization | Billable hours ÷ available hours. | Is capacity going to what gets billed? |
| Hours left to plan | Budgeted hours − planned hours. | What still needs to go on the schedule? |
| Peak load | The load of the busiest days (95th percentile). | Where will the schedule break first? |
| Overloads and underloads | Number of team members above 100% or below 80% utilization. | Is the workload fairly distributed? |
Deadlines and fairness
| Indicator | Formula | The question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| On-time delivery | Engagements delivered on the planned date ÷ engagements delivered. | Does the firm keep its client commitments? |
| Schedule stability | Share of tasks changed after their first placement. | Is the schedule reliable, or rebuilt every week? |
| Workload balance | Utilization gap between members of the same team. | Does the pressure always fall on the same people? |
And what is a successful schedule?
A scheduled task is successful when, at closing, everything happened as planned:
- it was not moved again after its first placement;
- it was carried out by the person planned;
- its status is “Completed”;
- logged hours are close to planned hours;
- the task budget was not exceeded;
- it was executed on the planned days (or within the same week).
The share of tasks meeting these six criteria measures the real quality of a workload plan: the planning success rate.
The three stages of a living workload plan
Roll forward the previous year, create engagements from templates, budget the time. This is the raw material: clients, engagements, budgets, team members.
Time off, urgencies, client slips: the plan readjusts, conflicts get flagged, suggestions get approved. A frozen workload plan is a dead one.
Profitability defended engagement by engagement, overloads anticipated, late tasks reduced: deadlines met without an end-of-period sprint.
Why not Excel?
Excel serves firms well up to a point: one file per office, one editor at a time, diverging versions, no overload alerts, no link between budget and actuals. The shared workload plan exists precisely for what comes next: several teams, profitability to defend, partners who want to decide on data.
See how Beeye handles each practice · The official feature list
Frequently asked questions
What is workload planning software?
Software that schedules engagements (who does what, when), tracks the time actually spent and compares actuals to each engagement’s budget, during the engagement, in a shared, real-time view.
What is the difference between workload planning and scheduling?
Scheduling says who works when; workload planning adds budgets, actual time and capacity, so decisions happen during the year, not after.
Does workload planning suit both audit and accounting?
Yes, provided it covers both granularities: the audit engagement tracked in phases over weeks, and the accounting team where one week holds ten engagements per person.
How do you start a workload plan?
With quality data: clients, engagements, tasks, time budgets, last year’s schedule, team members. That raw material is what makes a generated schedule right.
Which indicators should a workload plan track?
Four families are enough to steer: profitability (gross margin read as budgeted, planned, landing then actual), capacity (utilization, peak load, overloads), deadlines (on-time delivery, schedule stability) and fairness (workload balance across the team). Each indicator is read during the engagement, while there is still time to act.
And in your firm, what would it look like?
We take these indicators (capacity, overloads, margin per engagement) and show you what they look like for a firm like yours.
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