# Allocations: hours a week, soft bookings and overlaps

**Category:** [Resource Planning](https://help.totalctrl.app/hc/totalctrl/totalctrl-help-center/en-US/categories/resource-planning)
**Updated:** 2026-08-19

## An allocation is hours a week, never a percentage

You book somebody for a number of **hours per week** on a project between two dates.

Percentages were rejected on purpose: “50%” changes meaning the moment capacity does. Move somebody to a three-day week and their 50% silently becomes 12 hours instead of 20, on a plan nobody edited and nobody was warned about. Twenty hours a week is twenty hours a week.

## Partial weeks pro-rate by working hours, not days

An allocation covering only part of a week counts in proportion to the **working hours** it overlaps — not calendar days, and not a count of working days either.

For somebody who works 8 hours on Monday and 2 on Friday, a Monday-only booking is 80% of their week, not 50%. Counting days would get that wrong in both directions, and it would be wrong quietly.

## Overlapping allocations are allowed by design

Nothing stops you booking the same person on three projects in the same week. There is no constraint preventing it, and that is the point: 15 hours on each of three projects against 40 available hours is precisely the situation the grid exists to show you.

Refusing the third booking would not create the time. It would just move the third project out of the plan and into somebody's head.

## Soft bookings are excluded from the committed total

Mark an allocation **soft** for work that is likely but not agreed — a proposal out for signature, a phase that may or may not follow. Soft hours are shown, and shown separately, but they are **not** in the committed total and not in the over-allocation check.

A maybe must not read as staffed. If it did, the plan would say a person is full while a real project is looking for somebody.

A soft booking also sends no notification. A maybe is not news.

## The over-allocation threshold

A cell is flagged when committed hours exceed available hours × the threshold, which is 100% by default and adjustable in **Capacity & settings**. Some firms deliberately plan to 120% and absorb the slack; set it to what your team actually does, so the flag keeps meaning something.

## People are told when they are booked

A hard allocation sends the person a notification with the project, the hours a week and the dates, linking to their own schedule. Being committed to a project without being told is how a plan and reality come apart in the first week.

## Removing one

Deleting an allocation removes it outright — the plan is meant to describe the future, not accumulate a history of intentions. The removal is written to the audit log and fires a webhook, so the record of what changed still exists.

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## Related Articles

- [Availability and utilization: which number you are actually looking at](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/resource-planning-utilization)
- [Capacity, working patterns and time off](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/resource-planning-capacity-and-leave)
- [Who can see and change what, including contractors](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/resource-planning-access)
- [Resource Planning from the API or an agent](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/resource-planning-api)
- [What Resource Planning is, and what it deliberately does not do](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/resource-planning-overview)

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