Capacity planning before T1 season, in one afternoon
A lightweight way to work out whether the firm can actually absorb the coming season — using the records you already have rather than a new spreadsheet.
Most capacity planning in small firms happens in February, in the form of discovering that there is not any. The exercise below takes an afternoon in November and is usually enough.
Count the obligations, not the clients
Client count is a poor proxy for load. One corporate client with payroll, quarterly GST and a year-end is more work than four T1-only individuals.
Count the obligations falling inside the season instead — every filing, remittance and year-end with a due date in the window. If services and cadences are recorded per client, this is a filter rather than a count-up.
Apply a rough hour estimate per obligation type
Not a precise one. A simple T1 is an hour, a T1 with rental and investment income is three, a T2 with a bookkeeping catch-up is fifteen. Multiply, and you have a total that is wrong in the details and right in the order of magnitude.
That total is the number to compare against real capacity.
Real capacity is not headcount times hours
Take each person's weekly capacity, subtract review time, admin, holidays and the hours that non-season work will still consume. What remains is usually 55–70% of the nominal figure.
If the obligation estimate exceeds that, the season is already oversubscribed and you have three months to do something about it — decline work, move deadlines forward, add seasonal help, or drop a service line.
- Count obligations in the window, not clients.
- Rough hours per obligation type — order of magnitude is enough.
- Discount nominal capacity by a third before comparing.
- Decide in November. February is not a planning month.