What your spreadsheet work costs a month
Four numbers you already know. The page does the multiplication and shows its working, including the case where the answer is that you should carry on as you are.
- Numbers you enter
- 4
- Working
- shown in full
- Account needed
- none
The recurring ones. Not every spreadsheet you open.
Including the part where you check it again before sending it.
Your rate, or what you pay the person doing it.
This job, per month
14.5 hours
Worth $576 at the rate you entered.
- What it takes you now$960
- 24 hours
- Still yours afterwardsReading the answer and deciding what to do
- 9.5 hours
- Studio plan
- $19.99 a month
- Left over
- $556
It covers the plan on the 1st file of the month.
Every figure above is your four numbers multiplied together. There is no benchmark, no industry average and no assumption you did not type. The share defaults to 60% rather than 100% because the product does the work, not the thinking.
Where the hours go
The six stages below are what the product does with a file, and they are the same six words the processing screen uses while it does them. The first five are the ones the calculator is asking you to price.
Reading your files
Several tables on one sheet, a title block above the data, totals stranded in the middle.
Cleaning the data
Dates in three formats, numbers stored as text, the same customer spelled four ways.
Connecting the pieces
Working out that this export and that one join on a column with two different names.
Investigating what changed
The comparisons you would have run, run against every dimension rather than the three you had time for.
Checking the conclusions
The second pass. Every claim comes back with its calculation, its filters and its limits.
Building your outputs
The workbook, the deck and the report you were going to assemble by hand on Sunday.
Questions people ask
Where do these numbers come from?
From you. All four inputs are yours, and every figure on the page is those four multiplied together. There is no benchmark, no industry average, and no survey of anonymous companies standing behind it.
Why does the share default to 60% instead of 100%?
Because no tool removes all of a job. Reading the files, repairing them, joining them, running the comparisons and building the outputs are the parts that go. Knowing which question mattered this month, and what to do about the answer, stays with you. A calculator that assumes 100% is telling you what it wants to be true.
It says the plan is not worth it for me. Is that a mistake?
No. If you work through one small file a quarter, the honest answer is to keep doing it yourself. The calculator is allowed to reach that conclusion, and it is worth more to the people it does not reach it for.
Does it count the time I spend checking the result?
Only if you included it. Put it in the hours field, because it is real work: most of the time in a recurring report is not the first pass, it is the second one where you look for what the first pass got wrong. The product returns its checks and its limits alongside every claim, which is the part of that second pass it is trying to take on.
Do I have to give you an email address to see the result?
No. The result is on the page as you type, and nothing about your inputs leaves your browser.