How True Load is worked out

The whole calculation, in one line

True Load is your total remaining committed work divided by your effective capacity, times 100, rounded to one decimal place and floored at zero.

Everything below is what those two phrases mean. If your effective capacity works out to zero or less - a horizon entirely covered by time off, for instance - the figure is 100%, not a division by zero.

The bottom half: effective capacity

Candid Beacon walks forward one day at a time from today to the end of your planning horizon. For each day:

1. If it is not one of your working days, skip it. It contributes nothing.
2. Otherwise start from your hours a day.
3. If any time-off block covers that day, reduce it by the largest reduction among the blocks covering it - not the sum.
4. Add what is left to the running total.

Then the cognitive buffer comes off the whole total. At the default of 20%, a 160-hour horizon becomes 128 hours of effective capacity.

That is the number your work is divided by. The buffer is not subtracted from your workload and it is not shown as work - it reduces the capacity you appear to have, which is why raising it raises your percentage without you taking on anything.

Set your working hours covers each of these settings and its default.

The top half: your committed work

Only jobs that are active and have a due date count. A draft with no due date contributes nothing - there is no window to place it in.

Each counting job contributes:

(base amount + sum of its variables) × confidence × (1 − progress)

• Base amount is your estimate of the work, in your work unit.
• Variables are added, not multiplied. A variable of 1.5 on a 10-hour job makes it 11.5 hours, not 15. The value that has no effect is 0, not 1 - a variable left at 1 adds an hour to every job it is on. A negative value subtracts.
• Confidence weights tentative work. A confirmed job counts in full; marking a job tentative halves its contribution.
• Progress decays what is left. A job reported 40% done contributes 60% of its weighted amount. Progress moves freely in both directions - there is no ratchet.

The last two compose. A tentative job reported 40% done contributes half of 60% - 30% - of its total.

The word beside the number

The status is derived from the percentage, and the boundaries are fixed constants shared by every account. You cannot move them, and there is no setting that overrides them.

This is deliberate, and it is the product’s central claim: there is no way to publish “Available” while booked at 120%. The status is not a field anybody sets, including you.

What actually reaches your Beacon

Your dashboard and your Beacon can legitimately show different numbers, and it is worth knowing why.

• Your dashboard recomputes live from whatever is currently in your account, and its Pipeline toggle can blend tentative work in.
• Your Beacon reads the last published snapshot, and that snapshot is always computed from confirmed jobs only - however your Pipeline toggle is set. There is no configuration in which tentative work reaches a client.

So the figure on your Beacon is what you last chose to publish, from confirmed work only. See Republish automatically for when that happens on your behalf.

How much history there is, honestly

Insights draws on past snapshots, and there is a ceiling on how far back that can go. Automatic snapshots older than 90 days are deleted by a nightly prune. Publishes you made yourself are kept at any age.

So the longest period automatic history can honestly cover is 90 days, however long your account has existed - which is why the reports show the window they actually covered rather than the one you asked for.

A second thing worth knowing: a snapshot is written when the published result changes, not every day. Most days have no row at all, and the reports carry the last known state forward across the gaps, because that is what your Beacon was showing on those days.