What occupancy shows
Occupancy shows how many people are actually in your carpark, based on entries and exits. It has nothing to do with bookings, and nothing to do with how many bays you have.
This makes it different from utilisation. Utilisation tells you how much of your bookable capacity got booked over a period. Occupancy tells you how many people are in the carpark right now, and what time of day that peaks. It's a headcount over time, not a percentage.
Because bay count isn't part of this metric, occupancy can be higher than the number of bays you have. This is expected if you have drivers who are allocated a bay but aren't required to book, since more people can hold access to your carpark than you have physical bays.
How it's calculated
Every entry gets paired with its matching exit. At any given time, occupancy is the number of entries that don't have a matching exit yet, in other words, the people currently inside.
If an entry doesn't get a matching exit within 12 hours, it's removed from the count. This is a normal part of how the number is worked out, and it means occupancy carries an expected 5–10% margin of error. This usually happens because of a hardware misread, not because someone is genuinely still in the carpark hours later, for example a licence plate camera failing to pick up a plate correctly on the way out.
How you can view it
Occupancy doesn't reduce to a single percentage the way utilisation does. There are two views:
• Hourly Occupancy Trend: a chart showing how many people were in your carpark, hour by hour, over a time window you choose. A week or so works best; a very long range (like 6 months) gets hard to read at this level of detail.
• Peak Occupancy: a table showing the single highest headcount reached each day.
Neither view compares against your bay count. You'll know you've hit capacity by comparing the number against how many bays you have; the report itself doesn't do that comparison for you.
You can view occupancy at site level, or broken down by building if your site has more than one. It isn't available by asset group or booking policy, since occupancy is based purely on physical entries and exits, not on any booking arrangement.
Why this is useful
• If you have shift workers or staff who come and go outside standard hours, this shows you how your carpark is actually used across the day, not just a single daily total.
• If your carpark runs at high demand, utilisation might show 100% for the whole day, but occupancy shows you exactly what time that peak happens.
• If most of your bays are allocated and drivers aren't required to book, this is often the clearest way to see when people are actually coming in.