Allocation percentage expresses project assignments as a share of a standard working week instead of raw hours. It's the unit that makes capacity plans comparable across people and weeks: 50% means roughly half a week whether the person works in Kyiv, Warsaw or Lisbon.
Why percentages beat hours for planning:
- They survive calendar noise. A public holiday shortens the week's hours but a 50% allocation still means "half your time."
- They sum meaningfully. A person's allocations across projects should total ≤100%; anything above is an explicit over-booking decision, not an accounting accident.
- They map cleanly to billing models. A 60% allocation on a time-and-materials project sets the expectation against which actual logged hours are sanity-checked.
The discipline that matters: allocations are a plan, timesheets are the fact. Comparing the two per project per month is how you catch scope creep (actuals persistently above plan) and quiet under-delivery (actuals far below a client-funded allocation).
In Helia, allocations are percentages in the capacity matrix; each person's row totals into a utilization figure, and the bench row collects whatever is left under 100%.