What utilisation shows
Utilisation shows what percentage of your bookable parking bays were actually booked during a chosen period. It answers one specific question: out of every time a bay could have been booked, how many of those bookings actually happened?
It's worth knowing what this number doesn't tell you. Utilisation only measures whether a bay was booked, not whether the person actually showed up and used it. You can have high utilisation and still have a number of no-shows behind it; that's tracked separately.
It also can't show demand beyond what you have. If a site or group of bays is sitting at 100%, that's the ceiling of what the number can show. It won't tell you how many more people wanted a bay but couldn't get one. A site at 100% for months might have real, unmet demand sitting behind that number.
If most of your bays are permanently allocated, and drivers aren't required to book, utilisation isn't the most useful way to see how your portfolio is actually performing. Allocated bays always count as used in a utilisation report, whether or not anyone actually parked that day. In this case, reports based on access events, like occupancy or no-shows, will give you a much clearer picture of real activity than bookings created.
How it's calculated
Utilisation = bookings made ÷ bookings possible, for the period you're looking at.
Bookings possible comes from your bookable bays and the number of bookable days in that period. For example, 30 bookable bays across a 30-day month gives 900 possible bookings.
Weekends are usually left out of this calculation when most of your bookings happen Monday to Friday, since that points to a standard office workforce and weekends aren't real demand days for you. If your team is genuinely rostered on weekends too, for example in retail or hospitality, weekends are included instead, since leaving them out would hide real demand rather than remove noise.
The three ways you can view utilisation
The same word, utilisation, can mean a different thing depending on what you're looking at. There are three views:
• Portfolio: every site you own, rolled into one number.
• Site: every bay uploaded for that site, including bays that aren't bookable (like contractor bays) and bays permanently allocated to one person.
• Asset group: just the bays covered by one specific asset group, like staff parking or visitor bays.
Site and portfolio views naturally read lower than an asset group view, and that's expected, not a problem. They're built to show your whole inventory story, including bays that were never meant to be booked in the first place, so you can see the full picture of what you have and how it's being used.
If you want the true number for how well your bookable bays are performing, the asset group view is the one to look at. If you want to understand your overall footprint, or why a site's number looks low, the site or portfolio view is more useful, and the asset group view can then explain what's happening underneath it.
What can affect your utilisation number
A few things commonly shape what you see in your reports:
• Overflow policies: if a group of bays (for example, a business unit's reserved bays) isn't fully booked by its priority group, an overflow setup lets other people book the spare bays instead. Without this, bays can sit empty even though someone else could have used them.
• Weekday patterns: it's common to see Tuesday to Thursday fully booked while Monday and Friday run lower, reflecting typical office attendance patterns.
• Reports that include future months: any month you haven't started booking for yet will show as empty. That's not a drop in demand, it just hasn't happened yet.