Every job carries an estimate, and every booking in the diary has its own length. These aren't always the same thing, and only one of them decides how full a technician's day looks. This article walks through how the numbers connect, so you can tell whether the diary is showing you the full picture.
📝 Note: For how to create and move bookings in the first place, see Introducing the Calendar and How Jobs and the Calendar Work Together.
📐 The Three Numbers on a Job
Every job actually carries three separate numbers, and they only ever flow in one direction:
Each service's estimated hours, set individually on every service you add to the job.
Est.HRS, the field on the job's Schedule Booking card. It's automatically totalled from all the services, but you can also type over it directly.
The diary booking length, how long the job's block runs in the Daily or Weekly View, from its start time to its end time.
Service hours add up into Est.HRS, and Est.HRS sets the length of a booking when it's first placed. Nothing that happens in the diary ever flows back to change the job, with one exception covered further below.
🖱️ Two Ways a Job Ends Up in the Diary
How a job gets booked to a technician decides whether it keeps matching Est.HRS afterwards or not.
Dragging the Job Onto a Technician
This creates one booking for the whole job:
It's sized to Est.HRS at the moment you drop it on.
It keeps following Est.HRS afterwards. If Est.HRS changes later, whether from editing a service or typing over the field, the booking stretches or shrinks to match, keeping its start time.
Dragging the bottom edge of the booking to resize it only changes that booking's end time. It doesn't touch Est.HRS or any service's hours.
⚠️ Important: Because a whole-job booking keeps following Est.HRS, resizing it by hand in the diary isn't necessarily permanent. If a service's hours change afterwards, the booking will stretch or shrink to match the new Est.HRS again, undoing your manual resize.
Using the Scheduler
Opening the Scheduler from a job works differently. Instead of one booking for the whole job, it creates a separate booking for each service, technician and day you allocate time to.
Each of these bookings is sized to whatever hours you enter in the Scheduler.
They don't follow later changes. If you edit a service's hours or Est.HRS afterwards, the Scheduler's bookings stay exactly as they were, they won't stretch or shrink on their own. You'll need to reopen the Scheduler and adjust them yourself.
Saving the Scheduler can update the services' estimated hours and Est.HRS to match what you scheduled. This is the one point where the diary updates the job, rather than the other way around.
🧮 How % Booked and Hours Available Are Worked Out
The % Booked figure and hours available shown for each technician and day are based entirely on booking length, never on a job's Est.HRS.
For Each Technician
Working hours: the technician's own hours for that day, or the workshop's opening hours if they don't have their own set. Any workshop closures or leave for that technician are taken off first.
Booked hours: the total length of every booking on their timeline that day.
Available hours = working hours minus booked hours. % Booked = booked hours divided by working hours.
If a technician's bookings add up to more than their working hours, Available simply shows 0h rather than a negative number.
For the Whole Day
The day's overall capacity adds up the working hours of every technician rostered on, then takes off the length of every booking, plus the Est.HRS of any job still sitting in the Unallocated Jobs column.
A job in Unallocated Jobs counts against the day at its Est.HRS, since none of it is booked to anyone yet.
Once any part of the job is booked to a technician, it stops counting at Est.HRS and counts only at its actual booked time instead.
Any of its services that are still unscheduled don't count against the day at all until they're booked.
🔍 Worked Example
A technician works a 9 hour day. The Daily View shows them at 50% booked, with 4.5h available, meaning 4.5h of bookings are on their timeline.
One of those bookings is only 1 hour long, but the job behind it actually has an Est.HRS of 4 hours 15 minutes (4:15). Maybe that booking was resized in the diary after it was placed, or it was scheduled through the Scheduler and never brought back in line.
Either way, the diary is only counting the 1 hour that's actually booked, not the 4:15 the job needs. Once the real 4:15 is accounted for, this technician only has 1.25h genuinely free, not the 4.5h the diary is showing.
Stretching the booking to 4:15 in the Daily View (or adjusting it in the Scheduler, if that's how it was booked) brings Available back down to the correct 1.25h.
✅ Keeping Estimates and Bookings Lined Up
Let services set Est.HRS. Leave the header field alone and it'll always match the total of the services, so a whole-job booking follows it automatically.
After resizing a booking in the diary, check whether the work has genuinely changed. If it has, update the service hours too, rather than leaving the booking looking different to the estimate.
Reopen the Scheduler whenever a scheduled job's hours change. Scheduler bookings never adjust themselves.
If a day looks emptier than expected, compare a booking's time range against the job's Est.HRS. A short booking against a longer estimate is the most common reason.