Overbooking does not feel like a maths error when it happens; it feels like a Thursday. Jobs run long, travel eats the gaps, and the crew finishes the week two jobs behind with three customers annoyed. Capacity is calculable, and businesses that book to a known capacity keep promises that overbookers break. The calculator below runs in your browser and tells you the number your gut has been guessing.
The calculator
Crew capacity calculator
The 85 percent booking level is not lost revenue, it is the buffer that absorbs reality. Queueing theory and every dispatcher's experience agree: systems booked to 100 percent of capacity do not run at 100 percent, they cascade, because one overrun has nowhere to land except the next customer's window.
Where the overhead percentage comes from
Travel and admin overhead is the share of the paid day that is not on the tools: driving, supplier runs, phone calls, finding the gate code, writing things up. For urban trade crews it typically lands between 25 and 35 percent, and it is worth measuring yours once from a week of timesheets rather than guessing forever; our free timesheet template captures exactly the columns you need. Route order is the biggest single component: jobs batched by area in a sensible sequence can halve drive time against jobs booked in the order the phone rang.
Using the number to run the week
Set the safe booking level as your weekly intake ceiling and defend it. When the week is full, the honest sentence is next available is Tuesday, which customers forgive; the dishonest one is we will fit you in, which they do not. Track jobs completed against the ceiling for a month and two useful things happen: your average job length stops being a guess, and your overhead percentage becomes a management number you can push down.
Pushing it down is the growth lever. Dropping overhead from 35 to 25 percent on a four-person crew adds roughly five jobs a week without hiring anyone, which at almost any job value outearns the cost of the tools that achieve it. That is the honest pitch for dispatch software: SKEDS batches jobs on a live map, sends changes straight to phones, and removes the call-the-office loop, which is where most of the overhead lives. The software roundup compares the options, and the Starter plan is free to test on your own numbers.
Capacity and the promise you make on the phone
The number this calculator produces is really a promising policy. Every booking is a promise made against future capacity, and the business's reputation is the running average of promises kept. That reframe changes the intake conversation: the question is not can we squeeze it in, it is which existing promise are we prepared to break, and said that way, the answer is usually none. Front-of-house staff booking to a visible ceiling make better promises than owners doing arithmetic in their heads on the phone.
Capacity also clarifies emergencies. Genuine urgent work is worth holding slack for, which is another argument for the 85 percent booking level: the spare 15 percent is not idle time, it is a product you can sell at urgent rates without breaking anyone else's window. Businesses that formalise this, keeping one afternoon per crew unbooked and pricing same-day work accordingly, convert their buffer into the most profitable hours of the week while the fully-booked competitor is apologising to two customers at once.
Frequently asked questions
Should I include the owner's hours in crew size?
Only the hours genuinely on the tools. Most owner-operators overstate their own field availability by the exact amount of time quoting and admin actually takes; count yourself as half a person and be pleasantly surprised.
How do multi-day jobs fit the calculation?
Convert them to hours. A three-day install is not one job, it is 20 to 24 job hours; the calculator's logic holds as long as everything is expressed in hours per week.
What if demand exceeds my capacity every week?
That is a pricing signal before it is a hiring signal. Raise your rate with the charge-out calculator, let the least profitable work fall away, and hire when the premium work alone fills the ceiling.
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Key takeaways
- Capacity is net field hours divided by honest average job length.
- Book to 85 percent; the buffer absorbs overruns that would cascade at 100.
- Measure your travel and admin overhead once instead of guessing forever.
- Shaving overhead adds jobs per week faster than hiring does.
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