Questions, answered

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.

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 extra facilities are £15 a month each.

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.

An add-on for the Group and Portfolio plans at £83 a month on an annual subscription, £990 billed up front, or £99 if billed monthly. 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 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, your account will be paused but your data will be retained so you can pick up where you left off.

Paid plans are billed by card, monthly or yearly, whichever you choose at checkout. A year costs ten months and is billed up front, so an annual subscription saves 17%. 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.

You can cancel at any time. Your access continues to the end of the period you have paid for, the month or the year. Refunds are not provided for partial periods.

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.

Your data is retained for 30 days after account closure. Personal data is then permanently anonymised. Audit logs are kept for as long as your account is open on any paid plan, and for 1 year on the free trial, before being permanently deleted after a 90-day grace period.