How to Use Your Hubstaff Data for Smarter Capacity Planning

If you manage projects, you know the squeeze: hit deadlines, stay on budget, keep clients happy, and somehow keep your team from burning out or sitting idle. Capacity planning replaces the guesswork behind those calls with data you’re already collecting every time your team tracks an hour.

Hubstaff hosted a webinar to show what that looks like in practice, led by two members of the Hubstaff product team. Jeff Holek ran the live demo and case study and Jean Fin covered project management integrations and the audience Q&A.

Aubrey Nekvinda, Product Marketing Manager at Hubstaff, moderated. Stephanie Levinson from SL Communications, a customer of 10 years, joined for a conversation on how her agency plans capacity and protects profitability with Hubstaff.

You can watch the full recording below or read on for the key takeaways.

Meet Beacon Creative, an agency with a margin problem

Jeff built the demo around a fictional agency called Beacon Creative, a 22-person full-service digital shop serving business-to-business clients across brand strategy, web, and content services.

Beacon’s story will sound familiar to a lot of agencies. It grew from 12 to 22 people in 18 months and added three retainer clients in recent quarters, so revenue keeps climbing while margins lag behind.

Jeff gave Beacon three problems to untangle:

• Two new clients are starting in March. The team has no reliable data on how it currently spends its time, so staffing the new engagements means guessing.
• A suspicion of overservicing. Leadership believes one or two existing clients are getting more hours than the retainer covers, but can’t prove it.
• One “slammed” senior strategist. She always reports being overworked, and nobody knows what she’s actually working on.

Start with how work is structured

Before any of that data becomes useful, it needs structure. Every hour tracked in Hubstaff attributes to a specific person, task, and project, and those all roll up to the client engagement they belong to.

You can break projects down however fits your business, whether that’s by client, by service category, or both.

Set the guardrails before the budget runs over

With budgets assigned to each project, Jeff pulled up a month-end view showing every engagement’s progress against its retainer. One client, Lumen Retail, had already overrun, while a brand strategy project sat well under its budget.

The point of the Project Budgets Report is to catch both cases early. Hubstaff gives you a few ways to set guardrails:

• Project budgets. Cap total cost or total hours per project, and have Hubstaff notify whoever you choose when spend hits a threshold you set, before the overrun instead of after.
• Member limits per project. Set a cost or hour ceiling for an individual on a specific project, recurring monthly to match a retainer cycle.
• Member limits across all projects. From a member’s profile, you can cap weekly hours across everything they touch, which is your first line of defense against burnout.

Use reports to staff the next project

Guardrails handle the day-to-day. The bigger payoff comes from using the same data to staff upcoming work more profitably, which is where the Time and Activity Report comes in.

The report lets you pivot, filter, and sort any metrics that matter to your business, then save the views as custom reports. Jeff walked through three insights from Beacon’s data:

• Sarah and Rachel logged similar hours with very different results. Both tracked around 60 hours for the month, but Sarah’s billable time ran far ahead of Rachel’s. That gap is a conversation starter, and features like activity insights and apps and URL tracking can help find where Rachel’s time goes.
• Mia cost more than she billed. As a junior employee still ramping up, that’s expected, and it makes her a good candidate to build billable hours on the new March engagements.
• Mia needs a senior partner, and the calendar caught a problem. The plan was to pair her with senior associate Ben, but the calendar view showed Ben on PTO for most of the first week of March. Spotting that before kickoff beats finding out on kickoff day.

Jeff closed the demo with the stakes: “Every hour that goes untracked is a quote you can’t back up. Every budget that goes unwatched is a client relationship at risk.”

You don’t have to start over on project management

A live poll showed attendees roughly split between planning capacity in Hubstaff, in spreadsheets or a separate project management tool, and not really planning it at all. That led to the question Jean hears most from new customers: Do we have to rebuild everything in Hubstaff?

The answer is no. Integrations with Jira, ClickUp, Trello, and Asana sync your existing projects and tasks into Hubstaff so your team can track time against them right away.

You can also enable two-way sync, so tracked time flows back into the original tool and shows up on the Trello card or Jira ticket it belongs to.

10 years of capacity planning at SL Communications

Stephanie joined from Panama to share how SL Communications, a public relations and strategic communications agency, uses Hubstaff. The agency works with regional and international clients and partners with other agencies expanding into Spanish-speaking markets across Latin America and the Caribbean.

Her main points from the conversation:

• Time is the agency’s core resource. It directly drives profitability, so without accurate measurement there’s no managing performance or margins.
• Before Hubstaff, tracking was manual and reactive. Time entries waited until the end of the month, and the team lost around eight hours per week to spreadsheet management and corrections.
• Real-time visibility changed how decisions get made. Stephanie can see how time is invested across projects and people, so decisions rest on data instead of assumptions.
• Utilization data drives hiring. When the team runs consistently at full capacity across accounts, that’s the signal to hire. “The decision becomes strategic and not emotional,” she said.

Asked about the biggest impact after a decade on the platform, her answer was clarity. Operating transparently across projects gave the agency structure through its growth, and it now runs with more control, better margins, and more sustainable planning.

From the Q&A: Auditing your billable time

Two related audience questions closed the session, both about billable hours.

Can the same project include billable and non-billable time?

Yes. The billable setting lives at the project level, so every hour tracked to a billable project counts as billable by default.

From there, you can edit any individual time entry to flip it the other way. That covers the cases where a normally billable project includes hours you won’t invoice, or vice versa.

How do you check that your billing setup is correct?

Jean demonstrated this live in the Time and Activity Report. Add a billable time or bill amount column, then apply a custom filter for projects with billed amounts above zero to confirm everything that should be billing is.

Run the same filter in reverse, showing projects with no billed time, and you get a list of engagements where the billing details may need fixing on the project management page.

Two more features worth knowing about

Aubrey and Jeff closed with a look at two other parts of the platform:

• Remote versus office insights. Part of the Insights add-on, this view compares how your team performs at home versus in the office, including differences in apps, URLs, and utilization across hybrid schedules.
• Reseller portal. A formal partnerships program paired with an admin view for managing multiple organizations from one place, built for service providers who roll out Hubstaff to their own clients.

Ready to plan capacity with real data?

Every takeaway from the session points in the same direction: the tracking data you already collect can tell you who has room, who’s overloaded, and which engagements are eating your margin.

If you want to see it with your own team’s data, book a demo, and we’ll walk you through a setup that fits how you work.