Set your working hours
These six settings are what your workload is measured against. They live in Work setup, on the Capacity tab, and every one of them ships with a working default.
How capacity is built
Candid Beacon does not ask you for a number of hours a week. It walks forward day by day through your planning horizon, counts the days you actually work, adds up the hours on each of them, then takes a slice off the top.
- Working days - which weekdays count at all. Days you do not work contribute nothing.
- Hours a day - how much each working day is worth.
- Planning horizon - how many weeks forward to look.
- Cognitive buffer - the fraction of the total held back before anything is compared against it.
Time off reduces individual days inside that walk rather than being subtracted at the end - see Book time off and go away.
Each setting, and what it accepts
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Working days | Mon–Fri | The weekdays counted in the day-walk. |
| Hours a day | 8 | Added for each working day inside the horizon. |
| Planning horizon | 4 weeks | Between 1 and 52. Fractions are accepted - see the note below before using one. |
| Cognitive buffer | 20% | Between 0 and 50%. Held back before your load is compared against anything, so it is capacity you never appear to have. |
| Availability threshold | 80% | Between 0 and 100. The level your next opening date is measured against - not the status bands. |
| Timezone | UTC | Which calendar day “today” is for your account. An unrecognised value falls back to UTC rather than failing. |
There is also a work unit setting - hours or days. It changes the label only. The arithmetic is identical either way, so switching it does not move your percentage.
The threshold is not the status bands
These two are the pair most often confused, and they answer different questions.
- The status bands are fixed and the same for every account: Available under 50%, Busy from 50 to 79%, Full at 80% and above. You cannot move them, and the word on your Beacon comes from them.
- Your availability threshold is yours, and it is the level the next-opening walk targets: the date it names is the first one at which your projected load drops back to or below it.
So a threshold of 60% and a load of 70% gives a Beacon that says Busy and also names a future opening date. Both are true; they are describing different things.
Your timezone decides which day is today
Every day-based part of the calculation is anchored to your calendar day, not to UTC: which week you are in, which days a time-off block covers, when a repeating job materialises, and which day a snapshot is dated.
A day you mark off is that day in your own zone. If you set the timezone and nothing appears to change, that is expected - accounts on UTC behave exactly as they did, and for a whole number of weeks the total capacity is the same whichever day the window starts on.
A note on fractional horizons
The planning horizon accepts a value like 4.5 weeks, and it will do what you ask - but a window that is not a whole number of weeks holds a different number of working days depending on which weekday it starts on. A 31-day window holds 22 or 23 working days, so your capacity, and therefore your percentage, moves slightly from day to day even when nothing about your work has changed.
That is not a fault; the number really is different. But if you have automatic republishing switched on, it means your Beacon genuinely does update most nights. A whole number of weeks is flat, because any seven-day multiple holds the same weekdays wherever it begins.