Stack Planning is Gable's building-level view for managing space — a step up from the day-to-day desk and room booking you already know. Instead of looking at one floor at a time, Stack Planning shows you how every team fits across an entire office: who has a seat, who doesn't, how full each floor really is, and what to change to fix it.
At the center of it is the Capacity Stack — a horizontal, team-segmented view that sits alongside the spatial floor map. Where the floor map shows where desks are, the stack shows how full each floor and neighborhood is, team by team.
🧭 How to Get There
Open the office you want to view and go to the floorplan editor.
Pick the floor you want from the floor dropdown at the top (or view the whole building at once).
In the top-right corner, find the Floorplan ⇄ Stack toggle (the map and stack icons).
Click the Stack icon to switch from the spatial map to the Capacity Stack view.
💡 Toggle back to the map icon anytime to return to the spatial floorplan.
🎛️ Setting the View
A few controls at the top shape what the stack shows:
Day – pick a specific weekday, or choose Peak / Low to auto-resolve each floor's busiest or quietest day from the last month
Data source – base the numbers on Bookings or Check-ins. Bookings show what people planned to do; check-ins show what actually happened. If a floor looks busier on paper than it feels in person, check-ins are usually the more honest number.
Capacity – toggle between Effective and Physical seats
The KPIs up top
A row of cards summarizes the whole office:
Physical seats – total seats from the floor plans
Effective capacity – seats adjusted by sharing ratios
Allocated headcount – people assigned, from HRIS
Unseated – allocated people without a seat
Utilization – how full the office is
🏢 Floor Rows
The panel is a list of floors. Each row shows, at a glance:
Floor name, neighborhood count, and seat breakdown (dedicated / shared)
How full it is — people placed / capacity, plus a %
A roll-up bar segmented by team, colored per group
👉 Click a floor to expand it into its neighborhoods.
🧩 Neighborhood Rows
When a floor is expanded, each neighborhood shows:
Physical seats, sharing ratio, and effective capacity
Placed / capacity and a % — flagged 🔴 red when over capacity
A bar segmented by team: dedicated seats are dotted, shared seats are solid. Any overflow is clipped at the edge with an "Over capacity by N" note.
💡 Tip: The Effective / Physical toggle changes the denominator everywhere — summaries, percentages, and bar widths all follow it. If a floor looks more or less full than you expected, check which capacity mode you're in.
🪑 Dedicated vs. Shared Seats
Think of a neighborhood as an area set aside for a team. The desks in it come in two flavors:
Dedicated – desks reserved for someone in particular: a named person, or a different team. That seat is theirs, so it counts as exactly one seat for one person.
Shared – desks that aren't reserved for anyone specific. They're the neighborhood's common pool: free desks plus desks the team simply shares among themselves. People grab them as needed.
📈 Why the Difference Matters
Because not everyone comes in every day, a handful of shared desks can comfortably serve a larger team across the week. That multiplier is the sharing ratio (e.g. 1.5×) — and it applies only to shared desks. Dedicated desks stay one-to-one, since they're always held for their owner.
Example: A neighborhood has 20 desks — 8 reserved for specific people (dedicated) and 12 in the shared pool. At a 1.5× ratio, it can effectively seat:
8 + (12 × 1.5) = 26 people over a typical week.
That's the difference between physical capacity (20) and effective capacity (26).
⚠️ Headcount alone can be misleading. 100 people assigned against 20 shared desks looks alarming until you check utilization — if those desks are only booked 10% of the time, 20 may be plenty. Stack Planning always shows headcount next to utilization so you're planning against real usage, not just a roster count.
🔀 Reallocating Teams in the Stack
The stack isn't just a read-only summary — you can rearrange teams directly in it:
The team list on the left shows every group assigned to the office, with headcount and percent placed. It's sorted to surface your most unplaced teams first, and you can search or filter it.
Drag a team out of a neighborhood into the unseated queue, or drag an unplaced team into an open neighborhood.
If a neighborhood is already occupied, you'll be prompted to choose how to handle it: share it between both teams, transfer it entirely, or split access by specific days of the week (e.g., Team A gets Monday and Tuesday, Team B gets the rest).
This makes it easy to test "what if we moved Engineering to Floor 8" without touching a single desk yet.
📝 From Stack to Floor Plan: Applying Your Changes
Rearranging teams in the stack doesn't change your live floor plan right away. Instead, every move you make is added to a to-do list.
Nothing is applied to the floor plan automatically — the stack is a planning layer, not a live edit.
When you're ready, head to the floor plan to review the list. You can apply changes one at a time or all at once.
This means you can freely explore reallocation ideas — moving teams around, testing different splits — and only commit the ones you actually want to keep.
💡 When you first open the stack for a floor, it's pre-populated using an automatic best-fit allocation based on your current teams and floor plan rules, so you're never starting from a blank slate — you're refining a starting point.
🗂️ Working in Scenarios
Stack Planning lives inside a scenario (also shown as a "draft" in some views) — a working copy of your floor plan that you can edit freely without affecting what's live.
Changes in a scenario save automatically as you go, but nothing reaches your live floor plan until you explicitly apply it.
You can create multiple scenarios off the same office to compare different approaches side by side, then decide which one to publish.
If two scenarios (or a scenario and the live plan) changed the same thing, you'll see exactly what's in conflict when you apply, and can choose which version to keep.
Made a change you want to undo after publishing? You can start a new scenario from any archived version of the floor plan and apply that to roll back.
👥 Finding People with the Users Tab
The Users tab gives you a quick, searchable view of everyone tied to the office — filterable by assigned/unassigned, department, custom groups, or new hires. It's the fastest way to answer "who still doesn't have a seat?" and, once you've found them, you can drag them straight onto an open desk on the floor plan.
🔭 What's Next
Stack Planning is actively evolving. On the roadmap: utilization data broken down at the floor and neighborhood level (not just office-wide), and AI-assisted stack planning — describe your constraints (an RTO policy, a team adjacency requirement, a capacity ceiling) and get a suggested allocation to start from.
📋 Quick Reference
Term | What it means |
Capacity Stack | Horizontal, team-segmented view of how floors fill up, next to the floorplan |
Peak / Low | Auto-resolves each floor's busiest / quietest day from the last month |
Dedicated seat | Reserved for a specific person or team; counts 1:1 |
Shared seat | Common pool; multiplied by the sharing ratio |
Sharing ratio | Multiplier applied to shared desks only (e.g. 1.5×) |
Effective capacity | Dedicated + (shared × ratio) |
Physical seats | Raw desk count from the floor plan |
Over capacity | More people placed than capacity allows; flagged red with an "Over capacity by N" note |
Scenario / Draft | A working copy of a floor plan you can edit without affecting the live version |
To-do list | Changes made in the stack, queued until you apply them to the floor plan |
🎥 Video Walkthrough
❓ Need More Help?
💬 Use the chat bubble in the bottom-right corner of your screen to contact Support
📧 Or email us anytime at support@gable.to