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    • Manage freelancer capacity

    Explore how Smartcat calculates and displays freelancer capacity to project managers, helping them make informed decisions when assigning tasks.

    It is common knowledge that Smartcat makes it easy to assign freelancers to a task in a project. It might, however, get tricky if you do not know in advance whether the freelancer is ready to take on a new task, and whether they are able to complete it on time. Smartcat relieves project managers of this difficulty by calculating freelancer capacity in advance and presenting it in a clear and accessible way.

    To enable Smartcat to assess capacity correctly, freelancers are requested to update their profile with the pertinent information. This information includes the following:

    • Average daily performance in words per day. This parameter should be set for every service offered by the freelancer.

    • Indication whether the freelancer is open for work, that is whether they are ready to take on a new project; what are their working days during the week, and what days they will be unavailable on. This information is entered into the Availability section in the freelancer profile.

    Providing these parameters makes capacity assessment significantly more accurate. If they are not indicated, Smartcat will go by industry-average productivity and typical work week.

    When looking for the supplier for a specific task, the project manager navigates to the Tasks tab in the project settings, opens the required task and clicks Find suppliers.

    Smartcat then sifts through the suitable suppliers, assesses their capacity and productivity, and displays those suppliers in a list sorted by their availability:

    Hovering over the Estimated completion date for a specific freelancer shows what this calculation is based on. Note, however, that Smartcat also takes into account the tasks currently assigned to the freelancer. Consider, for example, a freelancer who works five days a week with the Daily performance of 1,500 words per day. This freelancer is currently assigned with two tasks of 3,000 words each. Therefore, when calculating this freelancer's availability, Smartcat will factor in the four days that the freelancer needs to have completed the outstanding tasks before taking on a new one.

    If the task deadline is specified, Smartcat evaluates whether it will be met according the the estimated completion date. If yes, the clock icon next to the date will be green; if not, it will be red. If the deadline is not specified, the clock icon will remain grey.

    Unavailable freelancers are displayed after the available ones and their status is set to Busy. There are various reasons for Smartcat to determine that the freelancer is not available. In addition to the obvious cases when the freelancer's profile indicates that they are currently not available, freelancers who do not log in to Smartcat for over 2 weeks will be automatically assigned with Busy status.