Every service company has months that stack up. For window cleaners it’s often spring and fall, when quarterly and twice-a-year accounts land together. For HVAC it’s the tune-up seasons before heat and cold arrive. Crew capacity planning is the habit of checking, months ahead, whether the work you’ve already sold fits in the days your people can actually work.
It comes down to two numbers
Capacity planning sounds like a spreadsheet project. At its core it’s a comparison of two figures for each month:
- Work needed: every recurring visit due that month, times its hours on site, times the crew size it needs. Divide by the length of a working day and you have man-days needed.
- Days available: each technician’s working days that month, after time off and holidays. That’s man-days you can work.
When needed is well above available, you have a busy-season problem. When it’s well below, you have room to sell.
Gather the inputs honestly
The comparison is only as good as what goes in. The usual weak spots:
- Hours per visit. Use what the job takes, not what you quoted. If a building always runs long, write down the real number.
- Crew size. A two-person job is two man-days per day on site, not one.
- Drive time. A day with eight short stops across town holds less work than a day on one campus. Leave room for it.
- Time off. Planned vacations, training days and holidays all come out of available days.
Read the gaps
Once you have both numbers by month, look for patterns rather than single figures:
- Stacked months. If March and October sit far above the line and February and November sit below it, some quarterly accounts can probably shift by a few weeks.
- A steady shortfall. If most months are over, the answer isn’t rescheduling. It’s hiring, or pricing.
- Quiet months. Months well under capacity are the time to sell add-on services, or to schedule internal work like training and truck maintenance.
Options when a month is over
- Move flexible work. Accounts serviced “sometime in spring” can be pulled into a quieter month, with the customer’s agreement.
- Change the week of the month. Spreading quarterly accounts across week 1, 2, 3 and 4 smooths the load inside a month.
- Bring someone on earlier. A seasonal hire who starts two weeks before the rush has time to learn the routes.
- Review prices. If the work never fits, some of it may be priced too low to be worth the overtime.
How Sentra Scheduler does the math
In Sentra Scheduler the inputs already exist, so the comparison doesn’t need a separate spreadsheet. Each recurring job carries its frequency, months, hours and crew size, and each technician has working hours and time off on crew days.
The forecast turns that into the next 12 months: visits, man-hours, man-days and value per month, with the man-days needed next to the man-days your technicians can work, so over-capacity months stand out. Open a month to see the jobs behind it, with customer, service area and man-days, and decide which ones can move.
It also closes the loop. Forecast against actual shows what the jobs said would happen next to the visits done and hours worked, so if your hour estimates are optimistic, it shows up. The price review lists jobs with a low hourly rate or a price that hasn’t changed in a long time. Every job report downloads to Excel if you want to work the numbers yourself.
What the forecast uses, and what it doesn’t
The forecast is built from active recurring jobs. Proposed jobs show separately as pipeline, so you can see what the season would look like if they close. One-off service calls aren’t in the forecast itself, because nobody knows yet when the furnace will fail; they do show in forecast against actual once they’re done. If your business is mostly repair calls, leave headroom for them when you read the capacity line.
An example, start to finish
Picture a window cleaning company with three two-person crews. In January the owner opens the next twelve months and sees April and October well over the line, because most quarterly storefronts were set up in the first week of the quarter years ago. Opening April shows the jobs behind it. The owner moves a group of downtown accounts to the last week of March and spreads others across weeks two to four. October gets the same treatment. The remaining gap in October is small enough that a seasonal hire starting mid-September covers it, and the decision is made in January instead of in a panic in September.
Make it a quarterly habit
Crew capacity planning isn’t a one-time exercise. A short review each quarter, and again before the busy season, is enough: check the next six months, move what can move, and decide on hiring while there is still time to train. For the day-to-day side of the same question, who rides together and in which truck, see crew scheduling with trucks and equipment.