Utilisation rate

The share of sellable capacity actually sold: chair hours, room hours, tables, practitioner time. Empty capacity is a cost that never sends an invoice.

Every service business sells time-slices of something finite: chairs, rooms, tables, practitioners. Utilisation is the percentage of those slices that earned money. It is the supply-side twin of marketing: winning customers you have no capacity to serve wastes demand, and paying for capacity nobody books wastes supply.

The management value is in the pattern, not the average: utilisation by hour and by day shows which quiet periods deserve an offer, which peak periods deserve premium pricing, and whether the roster matches when customers actually come. Watch it next to the no-show rate; a full book that does not arrive is empty capacity wearing makeup.

Buyers read stable, measured utilisation as evidence of a managed business, which is why it appears in the KPIs short list.