Configure Adaptive Capacity in ServiceTitan Max

Overview

Adaptive Capacity is the real-time engine ServiceTitan uses to decide when your team has room for another job and which technician should take it. Administrators, office managers, and dispatchers use it to keep the schedule full without overbooking — and because Dispatch automatically honors the caps and rules you set here, configuring Adaptive Capacity is also how you tell Dispatch what "good" looks like.

In ServiceTitan, Adaptive Capacity and Dispatch are designed to work together from day one. Adaptive Capacity calculates availability and applies strategic rules; Dispatch reads that signal to assign the right technician to the right job automatically.

Things to know

• Adaptive Capacity and Adjustable Capacity Planning (ACP) are different systems. Adjustments made in one do not transfer to the other. ServiceTitan Max customers should configure Adaptive Capacity from the start rather than ACP.

• Adaptive Capacity uses this formula: Capacity Provided − Capacity Consumed = Open Capacity. Capacity Provided comes from technician shifts (or business hours, if shifts are not set up). Capacity Consumed is the time taken by scheduled jobs and non-job events that have timesheets.

• Strategic rules apply a percentage-based threshold to your natural capacity.

• Dispatch honors "all-or-nothing" Adaptive Capacity rules (where the capacity threshold equals 0%) for technician-to-zone and technician-to-job-type assignments. This means a rule that blocks a training technician from far zones on weekends will be respected automatically — no manual reassignment needed.

• Unassigned jobs temporarily consume capacity for every eligible technician until you assign them. Assign jobs to a specific technician as soon as possible for accurate reporting.

• Atlas, ServiceTitan's AI assistant, is built into the Strategic Rules builder. You can describe a capacity change in plain language ("After 5 PM, only book emergency calls") and Atlas will draft the rule for you to review.

Best practices

• Confirm your core settings — business units, job types with realistic default durations, skills, zones, technician profiles, and technician shifts — before you turn on any strategic rules. Adaptive Capacity calculates from what's already in your account; clean settings produce clean availability.

• Run Adaptive Capacity for two to four weeks at default settings (natural capacity only) before adding strategic rules. This gives you a baseline of how full your schedule actually runs so you can set caps grounded in reality, not guesses.

• Use strategic rules sparingly. Rules are most useful for exceptions — protecting capacity for high-value work, throttling low-value job types during peak season, restricting after-hours work to emergency types. If you find yourself writing more than 10–15 rules, your core settings probably need attention instead.

• Set capacity caps higher than you think you need. A 75% cap on a job type still leaves room to flex — and Dispatch will continue assigning within that envelope automatically. Tight caps (below 50%) often leave technicians underutilized.

• Use the Strategic Rules + Dispatch pairing to encode operational policies. A rule that restricts a training technician from complex job types means Dispatch will never assign them to those jobs, even when other technicians are unavailable.

• Review and adjust rules quarterly, and any time your team composition, service area, or trade mix changes.

Use cases

• A residential HVAC business reserves 25% of summer capacity for emergency no-cool calls by capping maintenance and tune-up job types at 75%. Dispatch continues to assign jobs automatically within those limits.

• A multi-trade shop blocks senior technicians from far zones during peak season using an all-or-nothing rule (0% threshold). Dispatch respects the rule and keeps them on high-value local work.

• A plumbing company restricts after-hours capacity to emergency job types only, so on-call technicians are never assigned to non-urgent maintenance overnight.

• A growing electrical business uses Adaptive Capacity reporting in advanced mode to spot underutilized days and runs a Marketing Pro campaign to drive demand into those windows.

Step 1: Verify your core settings are ready

Adaptive Capacity calculates from data that already exists in your account. Before you turn it on or add a single rule, confirm the foundations are in place.

1. Go to the top toolbar and click Settings.

2. In the side panel, go to Operations > Business Units and confirm every business unit reflects how you actually organize work (for example, Resi Service, Commercial Service, Maintenance).

3. In the side panel, go to Operations > Job Types and confirm every job type has a realistic Default Duration. A job type with a 0-hour or blank duration will cause Adaptive Capacity to massively overbook.

Caution: Wrong or missing default durations are the most common Adaptive Capacity misconfiguration. Walk through the full job type list with your dispatcher before continuing.

4. In the side panel, go to People > Technicians and confirm every active technician is assigned to a business unit, has the right skills selected, has an updated technician profile, and has an active shift in Schedule > Technician Shifts. Technicians without shifts do not appear in capacity calculations.

5. (Optional but strongly recommended) In the side panel, go to Operations > Zones and confirm zones are defined and technicians are assigned to them. Dispatch Pro relies on zone data to calculate drive times.

Step 2: Configure Adaptive Capacity calculation defaults

Calculation defaults tell Adaptive Capacity which technician attributes — business units, zones, on-call shifts, non-managed technicians — to factor into availability.

1. Go to the top toolbar and click Settings.

2. In the side panel, go to Adaptive Capacity > Settings. You may toggle between Basic and Advanced Settings. 

3. Review each Calculation Default toggle and turn on the ones that match how your business dispatches:        

   • Default to include Business Units in Availability Calculation — turn on if technicians work only in their assigned business unit.

   • Default to include Zones in Availability Calculation — turn on if technicians work only in their assigned zones. Recommended for Dispatch Pro.

   • Default to include On Call Technician Shifts in Availability Calculation — turn on if you want on-call shifts to appear as bookable.

   • Default to include Non-Managed Technicians' Capacity in Availability Calculation — turn on only if non-managed technicians actively take customer jobs.

4. Click Save.        

   Tip: Match these settings to how your reporting hierarchies are organized. If Business Units are excluded here, set your reporting hierarchy to Job Type or Zone instead.

Step 3: Set up the Dispatch integration

The Adaptive Capacity Dispatch integration lets Dispatch honor the rules you build in Adaptive Capacity — so a technician you've restricted from a zone or job type is automatically skipped when Dispatch assigns jobs.

1. Go to the top toolbar and click Settings.

2. In the side panel, go to Dispatch Pro > Settings and confirm your optimization preferences are configured — drive time priority, technician skill priority, and maximum drive time between jobs.

3. Confirm your technician skills are configured in Settings > Operations > Skills. Dispatch requires skills as a hard prerequisite to match technicians to jobs.

Step 4: Set appropriate capacity caps with strategic rules

In Adaptive Capacity, a "cap" is a capacity threshold percentage applied to your natural capacity through a strategic rule. A 70% cap on Maintenance job types on Tuesdays does not block bookings — it tells the system to reserve 30% of natural capacity for everything else.

Decide what to cap first

Before building rules, identify what you actually want to control. Common starting points:

• Job mix during peak season. Throttle low-value job types (maintenance, tune-ups) to protect capacity for high-value work (emergency calls, installs).

• After-hours work. Restrict on-call windows to emergency-only job types.

• Technician specialization. Block training technicians from complex job types or far zones.

• Day-of-week patterns. Reserve more capacity for emergencies on Mondays (when demand spikes after weekends) or restrict installs on Fridays (when crews can't complete multi-day work before the weekend).

Choose threshold percentages that match your demand pattern

There is no universal right answer, but these benchmarks are a reasonable starting point for residential service businesses:

Tip: Start high (85% or 90%) and tighten over time. It's easier to detect overbooking than to recover from undersold days.

Build the rule

1. Go to the top toolbar and click Settings.

2. In the side panel, go to Adaptive Capacity > Settings > Strategic Rules.

3. Click + Create Rule — or click Atlas to describe the rule in plain language and let Atlas draft it for you. 

4. Configure the rule conditions:        

   • Name — Enter a concise name for the rule.

   • (Optional) Description — Enter a description of the rule.

   • Activation Period — Select if you want the rule to be Ongoing, start and end within a Fixed Date Range, or be applied across a Relative Date Range that automatically adjusts relative to the current date.

   • Enable the rule upon creation — Select this to activate the rule immediately after you create it. If you don't select this, the rule will be inactive.

   • Conditions — select the business units, job types, zones, technicians, or skills the rule applies to.

   • Time window — set the date range, days of week, and arrival windows.

   • Capacity threshold — enter the percentage cap (for example, 75%) or use 0% for an all-or-nothing block.

5. Review the rule preview. Atlas will flag conflicts with existing rules.

6. Click Save.        

   Note: The Edit Adaptive Capacity Rules permission is required to create or edit strategic rules.

7. Repeat for additional caps. Keep the total rule count manageable — under 10–15 rules is a good target for most businesses.

Step 6: Monitor and adjust

Adaptive Capacity is not a one-time setup. As your business changes, your caps should change with it.

1. Go to Schedule > Capacity Reporting and use Simple Mode for a weekly overview of capacity vs. bookings. 

2. Switch to Advanced Mode to drill into daily capacity by business unit, job type, zone, or technician. Use this view to spot patterns:        

   • Days where you are consistently full early — consider raising caps or adding capacity.

   • Days where bookings fall short of capacity — consider lowering caps or running a Marketing Pro campaign to drive demand.

3. (Optional, in Advanced Mode) Apply a Manual Adjustment for one-off changes — for example, adding 8 hours of capacity for a holiday Saturday when one technician is voluntarily working. Manual adjustments are for exceptions; they do not replace strategic rules.

4. Review your rules at least quarterly. Adjust caps as seasons shift, your team grows, or your service area expands.        

   Tip: Use the Adaptive Capacity Scheduling Utilization report template to track how well your caps are matching actual demand. A persistent gap between capacity targets and actual bookings means your rules need recalibration.

How Adaptive Capacity connects to the rest of ServiceTitan

Adaptive Capacity is the capacity signal that other ServiceTitan capabilities rely on. When you tune capacity here, you also tune the behavior of:

• Scheduling — pulls available slots directly from Adaptive Capacity, so the self-service scheduler on your website only shows slots your team can actually fulfill.

• Contact Center and Voice Agent — use real-time Adaptive Capacity data when CSRs (or the AI voice agent) book a job during a call.

• Dispatch — assigns technicians within the rules and capacity envelope you set here.

• Marketing — campaigns can be throttled up or down based on capacity utilization, so you're not driving demand when you have no one to deliver the work.

Configuring Adaptive Capacity well is the highest-leverage setup task in ServiceTitan because it touches every other capacity-aware capability.

Want to learn more?

• Visit ServiceTitan Academy and enroll in Getting Started with Adaptive Capacity

• See Adaptive Capacity Home

• See Prepare for Adaptive Capacity: Configure core settings

• See Optimize Adaptive Capacity: Configure Strategic Rules

• See Use Atlas in Adaptive Capacity Strategic Rules

• See Use Get Adaptive Availability to book and reschedule jobs with Adaptive Capacity

• See Plan Your Team's Capacity