How allocations work

An allocation is a piece of work assigned to a staff member: teaching a unit, marking, preparation, research time, or anything else your institution counts as workload.

Allocations can be assigned by unit, course, delivery mode, or cohort, and each one carries a start and end date and belongs to a planning period such as a semester or year.

There are two ways allocations get into Opus:

Automatically. Opus imports allocation data from your institution's systems on a regular schedule, so plans reflect what's actually in your timetabling and student systems.

Manually. Planners and managers can add or adjust allocations directly, which covers the work that doesn't live in any other system.

As allocations are added, Opus keeps a running total of each staff member's hours against their FTE and workload target, so over-allocation and under-allocation are visible long before they become a problem.