How to tell if your practice is over capacity before someone resigns

Most practice owners find out someone is over capacity when they resign. The resignation letter is the first capacity report they have ever seen. By then it is too late.

The problem is that capacity is invisible in most practices. Work is committed in people's heads, in inboxes and in spreadsheets that are never consolidated. No one can look at a single screen and say who is at 130% and who has room.

Capacity planning does not require a complicated model. It requires two numbers per person: the hours they have available, and the hours of work already committed to them. The difference is their capacity. If it is negative, they are over capacity. If it is consistently negative, they are a flight risk.

The reason most practices do not do this is that the committed-work number is hard to assemble. It lives across job cards, email threads and memory. The moment it lives in one system, the calculation becomes trivial.

Once you can see capacity, three things change. You stop overloading the people who say yes to everything. You spot the people with room and load them instead. And you hire on evidence, when the numbers tell you to, rather than on the resignation letter.

Firmhub forecasts committed work against available hours so you can see who is at 130% this month and who has room. It turns capacity from a feeling into a number you can act on.