Open capacity

Start with gross work time

Build each worker’s calendar from employment or contract terms, approved availability, leave, and site hours. Then reserve training, supervision, documentation, meetings, paid breaks, travel, transitions, and other assigned work.

The remainder is potential service capacity. It becomes open capacity only after the relevant service and assignment gates clear.

Apply hard gates by interval

For each time block, check role, professional authority, competence, payer enrollment or payment route, authorization constraints, supervision, client population, modality, location, insurance territory, and facility access. Record effective and expiration dates.

Pending credentialing, future onboarding, or anticipated supervisor approval belongs in forecast capacity rather than current open capacity.

Account for travel and worked time

Federal DOL Fact Sheet #22 explains general FLSA hours-worked principles, including job-site-to-job-site travel during the workday. State law and actual facts may add duties.

Travel can consume paid time even when a payer does not reimburse it. Keep wage-hour treatment separate from the service-capacity calculation and payer rules.

Match open time to actual demand

An open morning block does not solve an evening waitlist. Compare provider and client windows in the same timezone, location, interval size, service, and setting.

Apply travel, session duration, transitions, access supports, preferences, and clinical fit. Report raw open time and demand-matched open time separately.

Separate capacity from demand

Open capacity is a supply measure. A waitlist, inquiry queue, and active-client shortfall describe different demand cohorts. Link them only after service, time, location, payer, and clinical requirements align.

Track three useful states: open and unmatched, offered to an eligible request, and accepted but awaiting final release. Each state has a different owner and next action. An accepted offer can return to open if a gate later fails.

Include rooms, systems, and equipment

Staff time alone may be insufficient. Center services can require an accessible room, safe occupancy, privacy, materials, communication tools, and working clinical systems. Community care can require site access or transportation. Telehealth needs an appropriate platform, privacy, technology, and emergency route.

Model each constrained resource at the same interval level. When two workers need one room, only one assignment is currently feasible. Record the binding constraint so leaders invest in the right capacity rather than recruiting by default.

Qualified clinicians retain clinical decisions

The current BACB Ethics Code addresses competence, available resources, supervision, client involvement, risk, and continuing evaluation for covered behavior analysts.

Operations can surface a technically possible match. A qualified clinician decides case-specific appropriateness within scope. Ownership and an empty slot create no clinical authority.

A fictional provider calendar

Rina has 32 weekly work hours. Eight are reserved for supervision, documentation, travel, training, and meetings, leaving 24 potential service hours. Six are blocked by payer or location constraints for the waitlisted service.

Release-ready open capacity is 18 hours. Client windows overlap with 11 of those hours. Raw open share is 18 ÷ 24 = 75%, while demand-matched open time is 11 hours. These figures describe this calendar version, without promising a client start.

Watch for false-open time

Common causes include duplicated worker calendars, missing travel, absent supervision, expired evidence, facility limits, overlapping groups, pending leave, and stale client schedules. Run conflict checks before publishing openings.

One float worker should appear once per interval. A room, device, vehicle, or supervisor cannot support incompatible simultaneous assignments.

Add a horizon and confidence level

Today’s capacity and capacity six weeks ahead have different certainty. Use an as-of time, planning horizon, confirmation status, and next review date. Separate confirmed supply from forecast supply.

For recruiting, count a candidate as pipeline rather than capacity. Hiring, onboarding, clearance, credentialing, training, supervision, and matching still need completion.

Measure conversion without hiding gaps

Track release-ready open hours, demand-matched hours, offered hours, accepted hours, and delivered hours as distinct stages. Use the correct preceding cohort as each denominator.

The CASP Organizational Guidelines public overview spans business, clinical operations, and risk management. This staged model is Finni’s editorial design.

Publish unused release-ready capacity by age and reason. A persistently open block may reveal weak demand overlap, a narrow payer configuration, location mismatch, or outdated availability. Review the underlying record before treating it as wasted labor.

Questions owners should ask

Ask which duties were reserved, which gates define release-ready, how travel is modeled, and when evidence expires. Audit overlaps and unique workers.

Review open capacity by service, site, day, time, credential, payer, and demand overlap. Assign false-open records an owner and correction date.