Usage & Capacity, under Admin, shows what each business holds and the work it does, part of the app by part, so you can see what is growing, what drives it, and when a larger plan, or a change in how a part is used, would make sense. It is a picture of each day, measured from counts and sizes alone: no record, message or file is opened to measure it, so whoever sees it sees no client, sale or message.
What it shows
Pick the business at the top when you run more than one. Overview gives what the business holds now: its database (its records, with the size they take), its files (pictures, documents, attachments, recordings) and its kept copies (the daily copies kept apart from the app), how much that changed since the day it is compared with, when it was last measured, its plan, and any background work of the business waiting or running.
Growth draws the database and the files over the last 90 days, each its own line, with every day in a table below the chart.
By Part of the App lists each part (Clients, Calendar, Messages, the Books, Inventory and production, and the rest) with what it holds in the database and in files, its records, its change since the day compared with, and its share of everything the business holds. Sort it by what it holds, by the database, by files or by growth. Open a part to see where it keeps things: each table, each kind of file, and whether its size was measured or estimated.
Activity counts the work each part did: API calls, webhook deliveries, background jobs and their time, messages sent and received, emails and text segments sent, the assistants' messages, the pay-as-you-go tools' calls, design jobs and copies made. Each shows yesterday, its daily average over the 30 whole days before today, today so far (days are counted in UTC), and a small bar for each of the 30 days; a day well past its usual pace says how many times its average it was, so a spike reads apart from steady growth. Texts, emails and the pay-as-you-go tools are billed on their own, under Billing; they are counted here to show what drives them.
How it is measured
- Records are counted exactly, table by table.
- The database's tables are shared by every business on it, so each business's part of a table's size (with its indexes) is worked out from its share of the table's rows. Those sizes are estimated, and marked so.
- Files are measured in file storage itself, by their size. Where storage cannot be read, their sizes come from what the app recorded as it stored each one, and are marked estimated.
- A file kept inside a record, such as a scanned bill, a signature or a recording, counts as a file, not as the database. A mailbox's messages count as the database and their attachments as files, so a mailbox full of pictures shows as files, not as a database grown large.
- Processor time and memory are shared by every business and cannot be put down to one of them reliably, so they are not shown; the activity is what drives them.
Each business is measured once a day. Measure Now measures it again at once, at most every 15 minutes. The detail behind each part is kept 35 days; each part's totals and the activity are kept 400 days.
Plans and allowances
The plans' allowances for storage and work are not set yet, so nothing on this screen limits a business; Overview says so beside the plan, whose name opens Billing. Once they are, each figure will show what is left and, at its pace, about when it would be reached, and the plans and their prices stay under Billing. A plan is never changed or charged because a figure grew: an owner chooses.
Who sees it
Owners see it, and admins with the Usage and capacity switch, which admins start with; an owner can switch it off or on under Settings, Logins. The switch shows the figures and Measure Now, and nothing of the business's records.
Best practices
- Look at Growth before Overview's totals: a line that climbs steadily for weeks says more about the plan you need than one busy day.
- Open the part that grows fastest and see where it keeps things: a part whose files grow is attachments or pictures, not the records themselves.
- Read a spike on Activity against its daily average before changing anything; an import or a busy week passes.
- Keep the Usage and capacity switch for the people who plan the business's capacity; it shows sizes and counts, never a record.