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4.5. Measure Technician Utilization Against Working-Hours Capacity
Set per-weekday working hours for each AlgaPSA user and run the Employee Utilization report to compare worked hours against capacity across your MSP service desk.
Utilization is the number most MSPs quote and few measure honestly. Hours logged is easy. Hours logged against what that person was actually available to work is the number that tells you whether to hire, whether someone is drowning, and whether the person you think is your busiest technician actually is.
The Employee Utilization report compares worked hours against capacity per user. Capacity comes from each user's working hours, so the report is only as good as the schedules behind it — set those up first.
The Employee Utilization report is available on Pro.
Set working hours on a user
User details gains a per-weekday working-hours editor. Open Settings > Users, select the user, and set the hours they work on each day of the week.
This handles the arrangements a single weekly-hours field cannot:
- A technician on four ten-hour days.
- A part-time bookkeeper working Tuesday and Thursday mornings.
- A dispatcher who covers a short Friday.
- A field engineer whose Monday is reserved for scheduled maintenance.
Technicians can edit their own working hours without administrator permission. This is deliberate — the person who knows their schedule changed should not have to raise a request to correct it, and the alternative in practice is a capacity figure nobody maintains.
Users with no working hours set are still reported, but their capacity and utilization show as n/a — no capacity set rather than being guessed at.
Run the report
Navigate to Reports and open Employee Utilization.
Figure 1: Employee Utilization over the last 30 days, with per-user worked hours against capacity.
Five totals head the report:
| Total | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Active users | Users in scope for the period |
| Worked hours | Total hours logged |
| Capacity hours | Total available hours from working schedules |
| Utilization | Worked hours as a percentage of capacity |
| Missing capacity | Users with no working hours configured |
Missing capacity is the one to act on first. Every user in that count is excluded from a meaningful utilization figure, so a report showing 84% across twelve users with one missing capacity is really a report across eleven.
Reading the per-user table
The table lists each user with worked hours, capacity hours, and a utilization bar. Sorting runs highest to lowest, which puts the people at risk of burnout at the top and the people with spare capacity at the bottom.
An asterisk on a capacity figure — 171h * in the figure — marks a capacity that was adjusted for the period, typically because the schedule changed partway through or time off was recorded.
What the numbers usually mean
| Utilization | Common reading |
|---|---|
| Above 95% | No slack. Any incident causes a slip; check whether time off is being recorded |
| 80–95% | Healthy for a service desk role with reactive work |
| 60–80% | Room for project work, or an indicator of underlogging |
| Below 60% | Either genuine spare capacity or time that is not being captured |
Low utilization is as often a time-entry problem as a workload problem. Before concluding someone is underused, check whether their work is reaching timesheets at all — see adding new time entries and time sheet approvals.
Print produces a clean copy for a management review.
Utilization is not billability
The report measures worked hours against capacity. It does not distinguish billable from non-billable work — a technician at 94% who spends half their week on internal projects is fully utilized and half billable.
For revenue-side analysis, use profitability reporting, which measures gross margin per client, agreement, and ticket.