Kalendar — Capacity Planning & Press Scheduling
How Kalendar tracks per-press capacity, estimates run-time, and helps you schedule across presses and operators without overbooking your production days.
Where scheduling lives
All of your scheduling happens in Kalendar, opened from the dashboard sidebar. It has two modes that share the same jobs: the Timeline (a Gantt-style board of presses or operators against the clock) and Calendar (Month, Week, Day, Agenda, and Year grids). The Insights panel on the right keeps your capacity and on-time numbers in view the whole time.
New here? Read the Kalendar overview first — it walks through every view and control. This article focuses on capacity and run-time math.
How per-press capacity works
Each press has its own daily run-time budget in minutes — 480 minutes (an 8-hour shift) by default. As you schedule runs onto a press, their estimated run-times draw down that day's budget. Kalendar shows the result as a Load bar on each press row and a per-day capacity bar in the Week and 3-Week grids: green when there's room, amber at 85% and up, red once the press is over 100% for that day.
A changeover buffer is reserved between consecutive runs on the same press to account for wash-out, re-registration, and ink swaps — so the schedule reflects real turnaround, not just print time.
How run-time is estimated
Kalendar estimates each job's run-time from its decoration method, quantity, and screen/color count, then blocks that much time on the press. The rough shape of the math:
- 1Screen print: setup time per screen, plus a per-garment print rate. Example: 100 shirts, 4 colors ≈ 25 min print + 12 min setup.
- 2Heat press / DTF: a per-transfer rate across the quantity.
- 3Embroidery: a per-piece stitch-out rate across the quantity.
- 4Open a job to see its estimate broken into setup vs. run, and the formula behind it.
When your crew runs production timers, Kalendar compares the estimate to the real recorded time and surfaces the gap in the Insights panel's "Est vs actual" tile — so your estimates get truer over time.
Scheduling a run
Drag a job strip onto the Timeline and drop it on the press (or operator) and time you want. Grab the strip's right edge to lengthen or shorten how long it's blocked for. Times snap to 15-minute increments and overlaps ripple so nothing double-books. Prefer a calendar grid? Switch to Calendar mode and place jobs by day there. Either way, capacity recalculates instantly.
Assigning a run to a press or operator
On the Timeline, a job belongs to whichever row it sits in. Drag it to a different press row to move it to that machine, or flip the grouping to Operators and drag it to a person to reassign the operator. Group by press to balance machine load; group by operator to balance people.
Operator grouping is the fastest way to catch an uneven day — three runs stacked on one printer while another stands idle jumps right out.
Priority — Normal, Rush, Hot Rush
Every job carries a priority. Rush and Hot Rush runs are flagged on their strips and can be isolated with the priority filter (All, Rush+, Hot) so you can see just the runs that need press time first. Priority also tells Run Kadence what to place earliest when it drafts a schedule.
Reading capacity at a glance
Three places tell you how full you are: the Load bar on each press/operator row, the per-day capacity bars in the Week and 3-Week grids, and the Shop Capacity gauge in the Insights panel for the whole period in view. The color language is consistent everywhere — green is open, amber (85%+) is heavy, red (100%+) is overbooked. The Machine Load card calls out a forming bottleneck before it bites.
Overbooking and how to handle it
Kalendar warns but never blocks — a rush job sometimes has to bust the limit. When a press goes red for a day, rebalance: drag the lowest-priority runs to a press with headroom or to the next open day, and keep an eye on the Insights panel's at-risk list so a shuffle doesn't push something past its due date. A practical habit: leave some Friday capacity open to absorb the orders that always land Thursday evening.
Let Run Kadence draft it
To fill an unscheduled backlog fast, click Run Kadence. Kalendar proposes a placement for each job as a ghost chip on the Timeline with a short reason, weighing priority and due dates and respecting each press's capacity. Review the ghosts, accept individual ones by clicking them, or hit Apply Kadence to commit the whole draft. You can always drag things afterward.
Treat Run Kadence as a first draft, not a lockbox. It gets you 90% of the way in seconds; you spend your time on the judgment calls, not the data entry.
Shop-hours and goals
Set your shop hours so the Timeline's working window and the live clock match your floor, and set a daily piece goal so the Insights panel can chart output against it. With both set, Kalendar's capacity and on-time numbers reflect your real shop.