Frequently asked questions

Current staffing is the team capacity you enter in the shared setup or each location. Required FTE is calculated from demand and planning assumptions. Entering 100 available FTE does not force a 120-FTE requirement down to 100; it identifies a 20-FTE shortfall.

No. Roster FTE measures paid hours expressed as full-time equivalents. Two 20-hour colleagues equal 1 FTE on a 40-hour full-time week, but headcount is 2. Required roster FTE also includes the model’s allowance for shrinkage.

Demand-side cost follows calculated requirements and your charging basis. Supply-side cost follows current staffing and dated staffing changes. Recommendations use the applicable staffing budget; they cannot create extra staff. A net FTE surplus can still leave gaps at particular times or in specific queues.

Leave current staffing blank if capacity is unknown. Enter 0 to confirm that no staff are available. Zero is a real constraint; missing capacity must not be presented as a confirmed staffing surplus.

Check demand, AHT, service targets, occupancy cap, shrinkage and paid weekly hours. More workload, less available productive time or a tighter target can increase the requirement. Splitting a queue between independent delivery teams can also change staffing efficiency.

A workload-to-capacity calculation can exceed 100% when demand is greater than the available handling time. It can also reveal inconsistent inputs. Check AHT units, interval length, available staffing, shrinkage, concurrency, queue and segment scope. For back-office work, excess demand may become backlog; it is not evidence that people sustainably worked above 100% occupancy.

No. Occupancy relates handling time to available service time. Utilisation depends on its defined time base, often paid time. Shrinkage is paid time unavailable for handling work. Compare metrics only after checking their denominators.

No. Results depend on data and modelling assumptions. Interval voice/chat modelling and back-office workload clearance answer different questions. Daily or monthly demand cannot establish every interval’s service outcome. Validate the plan against observed performance and an achievable shift schedule.

Presentation figures use the active queues, segment, history range, forecast settings, scenario definitions and saved shift plan. Check the scope shown on screen and in the exported deck before sharing it. Simulated records must be treated as test data.

Check timestamps, interval length, queue and segment labels, contact volumes and AHT units. Distinguish missing observations from genuine zero demand. Review mapping and validation results before forecasting, especially when combining sources with different reporting policies.

Compare methods on the same queues, periods and historical holdouts. WAPE measures relative absolute error; MAE and RMSE use contact units, and bias shows the direction of error. Lower historical error does not guarantee a better future forecast.

Treat them as planning sensitivities informed by historical error, rather than a promise that a stated percentage of future outcomes will fall between them. Use them to compare the staffing effect of lower and higher demand.

A percentage change divides the difference by the baseline. If the baseline is zero, the percentage is undefined. Use the absolute FTE or cost difference instead.

No. The number of shift options is not itself a cost multiplier. Scenario staffing and cost respond to the implemented workload and capacity assumptions. Review the saved shift plan and interval coverage separately to see whether the roster can actually cover demand.

Allocation divides the queue’s offered demand across delivery teams. A total below or above 100% would leave work unallocated or count it twice. Each team staffs its assigned share independently.

Required staffing cost is a planning estimate. It reflects the modelled requirement, charging basis, rates and minimum charges you enter. It does not automatically include every payroll component, tax, overtime arrangement or supplier fee.

Choose Presentation, then Executive overview. The default five slides cover the title, headline metrics, demand, staffing and scenario FTE/cost charts. Supporting sections are optional, and methodology is included in speaker notes.

Use the information icon for a quick definition, the searchable glossary for terminology, and the calculation library for formulas and worked examples. Methodology explains the model choices and limitations.

Do not assume that browser-held work is a recoverable cloud backup. Keep project downloads and exports you need before clearing browser storage or changing devices. Account and support services also hold their own records; browser processing does not mean all information stays on the device.

Use Help & feedback and include the page, selected scope, relevant assumptions, expected result and actual result. Avoid sending confidential source data or credentials. A reproducible example with anonymised values is more useful than a result alone.

Download your selected Google Sheet as Excel (.xlsx) or CSV, then upload that file. A live Google Sheets connection is not provided. Do not publish a confidential sheet publicly to import it.

It depends on the number of columns and the length of values. Around 25 MiB holds roughly 260,000 rows at 100 bytes per row, 105,000 at 250 bytes, or 52,000 at 500 bytes. These are estimates, not upload allowances: the workspace also limits each sheet to 100,000 rows, 256 columns, 20 sheets and 1,000,000 addressed cells across the workbook. Remove unused formatted rows and columns.

They form part of the current browser project. Download a project copy to keep them, or explicitly enable recovery on this device. Browser history is not a project backup. Excel and report exports are outputs; they do not preserve the complete editable project.

Your computer may associate the project file with an editor. Open the file from LoughPoint's Open project action to restore it. You do not need Cursor, Bash or a terminal. Use spreadsheet exports when you want to review results in Excel or Google Sheets.

Mapping suggestions recognise likely column names. They cannot confirm your reporting definitions, units or permission to use the data. Check the suggested mapping, rejected values and totals before confirming the review.