The Float Glossary

Common terms used across Float

Justyna Kawalec avatar
Written by Justyna Kawalec
Updated over a week ago

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Access rights - Specific permissions for people and guests within your team. Float provides various access rights so you can manage your team and projects effectively.

Account Owner - A user with unrestricted access to Float and is typically the one who created the account. Each Float team has a single Account Owner who can transfer account ownership to another team member.

Activity feedThe list of recent changes within the team that can be accessed by the Account Owner and the Admins. It communicates who made a change, what they changed, and when they changed it. It does not currently show the time logging records and changes made through the API. 

Admin - A user with permission to manage all people and projects within your team and access to Team settings.

Allocation - Planned assignment of the person's time to various tasks or projects.

API - The Float API allows you to programmatically access and manipulate your Float data, including people, projects, tasks, departments, clients, holidays, milestones, logged time, and reports. Authentication is managed via bearer tokens, which can be obtained by the Account Owner from the Integrations page within Team settings

Billable (on the reports) - The number of allocated hours from billable projects and tasks in a selected period. The percentage is related to the scheduled hours.

Billing - A guest user who has been granted access rights to manage billing and subscription details for the account. This role has the same access rights as Admins but with the additional ability to handle billing-related tasks.

Capacity - The total amount of work hours that are available for a team or individual to be allocated for project work, taking into account their standard work hours, planned work, and upcoming time off.

Client - The individual or organization you work on projects for.

Complete allocation - A way to indicate that the work has been completed (optional). When an allocation is marked as complete, a checkmark is displayed and the allocation color becomes translucent.

Confirmed allocation - All scheduled allocations are set as confirmed by default. If the allocation is not confirmed, you can set it as tentative. 

Contractor - One of the person types in Float. 

Date range insights (sometimes referred to as 'the loop') - Real-time analytics that allow you to better understand the workload and resource allocation to create more productive teams. By clicking and dragging over a specified date range on the Schedule or Project plan, you can see quick analytics for that period. This feature enables you to sort by filters such as unscheduled time or department, helping you identify who is available to take on additional work and when.

Department - A functional or organizational unit of people with similar skills, expertise, or responsibilities. Departments make it easy to organize your team into groups. You can sort and filter the Schedule by department or limit a team member's view to one or more departments.

Employee - One of the person types in Float.

Filter - A feature that allows you to search through your team's data and quickly get what you need. You can select from one of the default filters or type directly into the search field.


Guest - A user who does not need to appear on the Schedule but requires access to view and potentially make edits to it. This could include individuals such as finance team members who need to access reports or project managers who are responsible for scheduling work for their teams. Float allows an unlimited number of guests to be added to their platform for free, and these guests are not expected to be allocated work within Float.

Hourly rate - A rate that can be assigned to a person on a team. You can customize rates at different levels and the hierarchy for rate application is as follows: Phase rate > Project rate > Person rate > Role rate​.

Link allocation - A relation between two or more allocations. It helps to automatically shift related allocations together when a project timeline changes.

Log time suggestion - A visual representation of scheduled allocation on the Log team/Log my time page that represents unlogged hours. Logged time suggestion serves for quick time logging but it can be adjusted or deleted as needed.

Notifications - In-app or email notices about changes in the account. Notifications can be set on an individual and team level


Manager -  A user with permission to manage people, projects, or both.

Member - A user with basic access rights. They can have read-only access to view their own schedules, everyone's schedules, or one or more departments' schedules. They can also be given individual edit access that lets them: assign and edit allocations, schedule or request time off, set the status, log their own time, and view reports for the projects they belong to. They do not have access to view rate and budget information in the reports.

Milestone - A significant event or a specific point in time within a project's lifecycle. Milestones are great for keeping track of important dates or project updates. They appear as colored dots at the top of the Schedule that can be hovered over to reveal more information.

Non-billable (on reports) - The number of allocated hours from non-billable projects and tasks in a selected period. The percentage is correlated with the scheduled hours.

Overtime - Allocations beyond team members' capacity. If you schedule over a person's capacity for the day, the background behind the allocation will turn red to indicate overtime.

People Manager - A user with permission to manage individual people or departments. They can schedule and approve time off and set a status for people they manage.

People page - An overview of your team. It lists all active and archived users and sorts them by name, role, department, access rights, tags, type, and the people they manage. This is where you can add new teammates, edit the existing ones, and archive or delete them. This is also where you can import/export your team.

People tags - A feature to identify and track individual skills and talents within a team. You can filter any page in Float by a tag.

People type - A person/resource category in Float. There are three resource types: employee, contractor, or placeholder. All of them count as a paid seat and can be excluded from reporting when needed.


Person - Any team member who appears on the Schedule and can be allocated work. This includes full or part-time employees, temporary contractors, and any other resources you want to schedule (like placeholders). People may or may not have access rights assigned.

Person rate - a personal rate that is assigned to a specific person in the Info tab of their profile. This rate applies to all projects the team member is assigned to, unless a specific project or phase hourly rate is set up.

Phase rate - a rate that is assigned to a specific person in the Team tab of a specific project phase, that applies to that phase only.

Placeholder - A type of user that you can add to your team's Schedule, representing someone who is not yet a full member of the team, such as a new hire that you are planning to bring on board, or a resource, such as a venue that you need to rent.

Plan - A subscription to Float service. There are three subscription options available: Starter, Pro, and Enterprise.

Project - An entity that helps you organize your tasks, team, and important milestones together. It involves assigning a client, adding relevant notes or tags, setting a budget, and determining whether the work is billable, non-billable, or tentative.

Project budget - Hourly or monetary estimate of work associated with planning and executing a specific project. There are five project budget types available within Float.

Project Manager - A user with permission to create and edit projects, manage allocations and logged time, and potentially edit project budgets and employee rates if granted access.

Project Owner - A person in charge of an individual project. Anyone with access rights assigned in Float can be set as the Project Owner of a project. They can allow all Project Managers to edit the project and lock the task list if needed.

Project Phase - A component of a project that allows you to break down the project and its budget into smaller, manageable parts. Each phase can have its own team, hourly rates, task names, and milestones.

Project Plan page - A Gantt-style view of all your projects and teams working on them. It allows you to see key details for each project, such as which team members are assigned, the remaining budget, and existing work allocations. You can add project phases and milestones to break projects into manageable chunks of time, and it's simple to adjust plans by shifting timelines, archiving projects, splitting allocations, and re-assigning people.

Project rate - a rate that is assigned to a specific person in the Team tab of a specific project, that applies to that project only, unless a specific phase hourly rate is set up.

Project tags - A feature used to identify and track important project information. You can filter any page by a project tag. 

Projects page - An overview of all your projects. It lists all active and archived projects and sorts them by name, client, tags, status, budget, start/end date, and owner. This is where you can add a new project, create and manage project templates, and import/export a list of your projects.

Public holidays - Your team's regional holiday, based on the country and the region. 

Remaining budget - The percentage of the budget that is still available. On the Projects page, the Project Plan page, and in the allocation menu, the remaining budget is based on scheduled hours only, and it includes archived people. This budget does not take into account any logged time.

Role - A standardized position required for a team's project work. Roles are used to organize and manage team members within Float, making it easier to make bulk changes to the account and to find the right person for specific tasks or projects.

Role rate -  a default hourly rate that you can assign to a specific role within your team.

Schedule - A visualization of your team's planned work on a calendar timeline. A source of truth for team capacity. This is where the allocations and time off are scheduled. 

Scheduled % (on reports) - The scheduled percentage of the default capacity. Can also be set to display the billable percentage of capacity or the billable percentage of the scheduled hours.

Scheduled hours (on reports) - The total number of allocated hours (billable + non-billable) assigned in the period. The percentage figure is correlated to the capacity.

Seat - refers to a paid license required for each active person who appears on the Schedule. This includes anyone you need to plan for, regardless of whether they need account access or not. Float pricing is based on seat/month or seat/year.

Split allocation - A way to divide one allocation into smaller parts. Allocations must cover at least two days to be split.

​​Status - An indicator of where a user is working from (Home, Office, Travel) or any custom information about their current state.

Task - An optional component of project work used to group allocations according to a specific piece of work for easier tracking and reporting.

Team - An entity that subscribed to Float's plan, usually an organization, a company, or a department. You can sign up and manage multiple teams in Float.

Team settings - A section within Float that can be accessed by the Account Owner, Billing users, and the Admins to manage the account.

Tentative allocation - The allocation that is yet to be confirmed. By default, all allocations that are linked to tentative projects or tentative project phases are tentative as well. If a project is not set as tentative, any individual allocation within the project can be marked as tentative from the allocation menu.

Time tracking - A feature available on the Pro and Enterprise plans that measures how long your team spends on their assigned work. You can compare a person's scheduled time against their actual time to improve your team's efficiency and forecast future projects more confidently.

Time Off hours (on reports) - The total number of hours of time off assigned in the selected period.

Unscheduled hours (on reports) - The number of hours available to be scheduled in the selected period. The percentage is correlated to the capacity.

User - Someone with access to a team. They may be a person or a guest.

Utilization - A percentage of hours scheduled out of total capacity. If 20 hours are scheduled in a 40-hour week, that’s 50% utilization.

Views - A feature that allows you to save filters along with a sort order for easy access to specific views of the people and projects you need most. Personal views can be created by any team member for their use, and on the Pro and Enterprise plans, Managers, Admins, and Account Owners can create shared views that are available to everyone on the team.

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