When department management has to decide on the course offering, staffing or new positions, the questions tend to be the same. Is each member of staff meeting their teaching obligation? How is the work divided between them? How many hours does a course actually take? And where is the pressure highest? If the answers sit in each section's own spreadsheet, gathering them takes time, and the figures are rarely counted the same way.
In Excelsior every registration ends up in the same workload account, so the answers can be read straight from the data. Three places give management the overview:
- My section: The section's staff and courses on one page, with capacity, hours and balance.
- The Balance report: The balance for every member of staff or section, compared across three years.
- The course page and pivot: The hours spent on each course, split by category, term and year.
Is each person meeting their norm?
My section lists the section's staff grouped by job title for the selected year. For each person it shows Capacity, the teaching obligation for the year, the registered hours and Balance, which is the difference. A negative number means less than the norm has been registered, and a positive number means more. If staff hold course responsibility, the number of courses is shown in a column of its own.
| Name | Course responsibility | Capacity | Hours | Balance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Professor | ||||
| Staff member 01 | 2 | 1,680.00 | 1,549.25 | −130.75 |
| Associate professor | ||||
| Staff member 02 | 3 | 1,680.00 | 1,792.50 | 112.50 |
| Staff member 03 | 1 | 1,680.00 | 1,632.00 | −48.00 |
| Assistant professor | ||||
| Staff member 04 | 1 | 1,400.00 | 1,406.25 | 6.25 |
| PhD student | ||||
| Staff member 05 | 0 | 840.00 | 862.00 | 22.00 |
| Total | 7 | 7,280.00 | 7,242.00 | −38.00 |
Click a name to open that person's account and see which registrations make up the figure. If the job title uses an accumulated balance, an Accumulated column appears as well, so you can tell whether a surplus is new or has built up over several years.
How is the work distributed?
The balance tells you whether the hours add up, not what they were spent on. The pivot tool answers that. Put Name in rows, Category in columns and equivalent hours in values, and filter on section and year.
| Name | Teaching | Supervision | Administration | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Staff member 01 | 820.00 | 489.25 | 240.00 | 1,549.25 |
| Staff member 02 | 1,260.50 | 372.00 | 160.00 | 1,792.50 |
| Staff member 03 | 1,104.00 | 288.00 | 240.00 | 1,632.00 |
| Staff member 04 | 1,046.25 | 240.00 | 120.00 | 1,406.25 |
| Staff member 05 | 702.00 | 120.00 | 40.00 | 862.00 |
| Total | 4,932.75 | 1,509.25 | 800.00 | 7,242.00 |
This is where patterns show. Staff member 02 does the most teaching and is above the norm, while Staff member 01 spends a large share of their hours on supervision and is below. That gives you something concrete to discuss: who can take on another course, and who needs some relief. The layout can be saved as a report and shared with colleagues, so next time it shows the latest figures.
What does a course take?
Switch My section from Users to Courses and you see the section's courses grouped by programme, with the hours registered on each one. If the section uses budgets, each course also shows its budget and a Balance, which is the budget minus the registered hours. The budget is changed with Update budget on the course.
| Course | Budget | Hours | Balance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Programme A | |||
| Example course I (Autumn) | 420.00 | 446.00 | −26.00 |
| Example course II (Spring) | 380.00 | 352.50 | 27.50 |
| Example course III (Autumn) | 260.00 | 318.00 | −58.00 |
| Total | 1,060.00 | 1,116.50 | −56.50 |
Click a course and the course page shows a chart of hours by category for each term in every year you have access to. Courses with the same course code are counted together across years, so you can see whether a course has become more expensive over time, for example because more classes have been added. Below the chart are the course's registrations with units, norm, hours and member of staff, and Open in pivot opens the same figures in pivot. To compare every course at once, pivot has a Courses template with hours per department and course by term.
The trend over several years
One year can be uneven for good reasons. The Balance report under Reports therefore shows the balance for the selected year and the two before it side by side, with a Difference column showing the change from last year. The report can show each member of staff or the average per section and field, and it can be filtered on job title, section and active staff.
| Section | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Section A | 12.40 | 4.10 | −7.60 | −11.70 |
| Section B | −18.50 | −31.00 | −40.00 | −9.00 |
| Section C | 37.00 | 50.00 | 62.00 | 12.00 |
| Total | 6.60 | 2.30 | −2.00 | −4.30 |
Section C has been above its norm three years running, and the surplus is growing. That can be a sign that the section is short of people. Section B is consistently below, so there may be room to move work there before recruiting. Excelsior doesn't make the decision, but the figures let you make it on a shared basis. The report remembers your choice of columns, sorting and decimals, and the view can be downloaded as a CSV file.
Who sees what
Access follows roles. A section manager sees their own section in My section, while department management can switch between every section and see their balances. Pivot and reports are given to the people who work with the figures across the department. Everyone sees the same registrations, so there is only one version of the numbers.
Good advice
- Look at several years, not just the latest. A single year with a surplus can be down to leave or an extra course. A surplus that grows year after year is a pattern.
- Use budgets on courses. Only when there is a budget to compare against can you see which courses take more hours than expected.
- Save the questions you ask every year. A saved and shared pivot report gives you the same layouts with new figures, so you don't have to build them again.
- Keep registrations up to date during the year. The overview is only as good as the data behind it, and a mistake is easier to fix while the year is still open.