Let's say you can only budget 20 hours out of an employee's 40-hour week to work on your project.

That's a 50% load.

So, if you set the employees cost to $25,000 per year, a 50% load will calculate 50% of any time spent by this resource.

By adjusting loads, you can adjust both fixed and variable expenses from one location.

While you may be used to thinking of loads for "people" and variable expenses, they're equally useful when working with fixed expenses.

Let's say that lumber will cost you $2000 to build a 1000 sq foot room. If you later decide to change the room to a 500 sq foot room, you can adjust the load to 50% and the total cost will calculate properly.