See AllocBoard in 3 minutes

A person-month represents one person working full-time for one month. In AllocBoard, you can track partial allocations, for example 0.5 PM means someone working half-time on a project for a month. Person-months: what they are and how to calculate them.

Systems like Worktribe are run by a university's central research office to cost, approve and record grants across the whole institution. AllocBoard is for the research group running those grants: the PI, the project manager and the administrator who decide who works on what, month by month. It plans ahead rather than recording what already happened, so an overloaded researcher or a project heading over budget shows up before the next reporting deadline, and a group can start using it without an institution-wide rollout. It works alongside your institution's system rather than replacing it. You can import projects from a Worktribe CSV or Excel export; there is no live connection, and nothing is written back. Project management at the research group level.

No. AllocBoard is an independent UK company. It is not owned, run or endorsed by any university, and research groups sign up for it directly.

AllocBoard automatically sums up all allocations for each team member across all projects. When someone exceeds 100 percent allocation (1.0 PM) in any month, the system highlights this with visual warnings so you can rebalance before issues arise.

The Allocation Optimizer uses a deterministic algorithm to automatically balance staff workloads across your projects. It looks at your budgets and staff availability, then suggests adjustments to maximise everyone's time while staying within budget. You can apply suggestions one by one or all at once.

Yes. Expenses are a first-class part of a project, not an afterthought to the allocations. You define your own categories to match how your group tracks spending, log planned and actual amounts by month, and see them per project and per staff member alongside salary costs. Budget ceilings apply to expenses as well as allocations, so an actual line that would take a project over its award is refused.

Yes. Shared equipment and services are facilities in AllocBoard, booked by the hour against each project, month and funder, as planned or committed. Each month is costed at the price in force that month, and facility spend is reported as its own line beside salary and operating costs. Committed hours are refused if they would take a project past its Facilities budget, and a facility cannot be committed for more hours than the month holds across all your projects. Solo includes 5 facilities, Group 20 and Portfolio 50, and you can add more as extra facility seats, priced on our pricing page.

Yes, from a spreadsheet saved as CSV or Excel, starting from a template the import page gives you. You can import whole projects, either from a Worktribe export or from AllocBoard's own template with budget breakdowns. Into a project, you can import staff time, facility hours and expenses, including actual salary costs from your finance records, and a year's pay scale table can be imported in one go. Every row is checked against the same rules as figures entered by hand, so a row that would take a project over budget or a person over capacity is refused with the reason.

Each month AllocBoard emails your staff a secure link, with no login needed, where they enter the expenses they expect to incur on each project they are assigned to. Submissions land in an admin review queue where you approve them, query them or send them back. Next month's spend is forecast by the people who actually know what they are about to book, rather than extrapolated from last month's numbers.

Included on the Group and Portfolio plans, and an add-on on Solo, priced on our pricing page. Ask Alloc answers questions about your portfolio in plain English, from your own records. Alloc Agent reviews every project for you each week and tells you what needs attention while there is still time to fix it. Ask Alloc runs to 1,000 messages a month across the workspace on Solo and Group and 2,000 on Portfolio, on either billing interval. You can try both during the free trial.

Yes. Sign up and you get 30 days free, with every feature switched on and no credit card required. If your group needs longer than a month to evaluate it, email us and tell us what you want to try. We extend trials on request, at our discretion and for a limited period, with the same full access and still no card.

You can purchase a paid plan to continue using AllocBoard. If you choose not to, the workspace becomes read-only for 90 days: you can still sign in, view everything and download reports, but not make changes. Every Manager is emailed about 30 days and again about 7 days before the end of that period. Subscribe before then and editing is restored with nothing lost. If you do not, the workspace is closed and its data is permanently deleted 30 days later.

Paid plans are billed monthly or yearly, whichever you choose at checkout. A year costs ten months and is billed up front, so an annual subscription saves 17%. Pay by card, or on a yearly plan by invoice with your PO number on it, payable within 30 days. Payments are processed securely through Stripe. Extra staff, manager and facility seats beyond your plan's limits are billed alongside the plan on the same interval, so a yearly subscription buys yearly seats, and you can add or remove them at any time. There is no minimum term.

Yes, if your research group is in Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands. Choose your country when you sign up and every plan and seat is billed in euros, at the prices on our pricing page with the currency set to EUR. Card and invoice work the same way. Add your EU VAT number in the billing settings and your invoices carry the reverse-charge note.

Yes, at any time, from the billing settings in AllocBoard. Your access continues to the end of the period you have paid for, the month or the year, and the workspace then becomes read-only. Refunds are not provided for partial periods. A read-only workspace is kept for 12 months and then closed.

Absolutely. If you manage multiple research groups, you can easily switch between them in AllocBoard. This is especially useful for PIs or admins with cross-group responsibilities.

Core application data is hosted in the UK (London). We use Neon PostgreSQL with row-level security ensuring complete tenant isolation.

No. Each organisation gets its own encryption key, and row-level security policies enforce strict tenant isolation at the database level.

When a subscription ends, the workspace becomes read-only for 12 months. You can still view everything and download reports, and subscribing again before the closing date restores editing with nothing lost. Every Manager is emailed about 30 days and again about 7 days before that date. At the end of the 12 months the workspace is closed and all of its data is permanently deleted 30 days later. If you close the workspace instead, by deleting the account of its only manager, all of its data, audit logs included, is permanently deleted 30 days later. While a workspace is open, audit logs are kept for as long as it is on any paid plan, and for 1 year on the free trial, before being permanently deleted after a 90-day grace period.