How the meeting cost calculator works
This meeting cost calculator multiplies the number of attendees by the average hourly cost per person by the duration of the meeting. That gives you the total salary time consumed in a single session. It then scales that out by how often the meeting recurs each week, and by 48 working weeks, to show you the annual cost.
The average hourly cost should include wages plus on-costs: superannuation, payroll tax, and any overhead you'd reasonably attribute to that person's time. If it's a client-billable meeting, use your charge-out rate instead.
People-hours per year is a separate figure worth paying attention to. A 60-minute meeting with six people doesn't cost one hour. It costs six. That number stacks fast across a year.
The hidden cost of recurring meetings
A weekly 60-minute status meeting with six people at $55/hour costs $330 per session. Over 48 weeks that's $15,840. That's before you factor in the disruption cost: the focus time lost before and after the meeting, the context switching, the people who need to catch up because they weren't there.
Most businesses have three to five recurring meetings that follow the same pattern every week: someone reports numbers, someone else gives a brief update, nothing changes. Those are the ones worth replacing first.
Meetings aren't wasteful by nature. Most recurring ones exist to pass information around, and software does that better than a calendar invite.
Which meetings you can replace
Status updates: If the meeting exists to answer "where are things at?", an automated report or dashboard can deliver that same information without pulling six people off their work. The report lands in inboxes, people read it when they're ready, and the meeting disappears.
Check-ins: Weekly check-ins between a manager and team often exist because there's no other way to surface blockers. An async update in a shared doc or Slack channel does the same job in two minutes instead of thirty.
Data review meetings: If your team spends the first fifteen minutes of a meeting pulling numbers together, that's a process problem. An automation can gather the numbers and format them before anyone sits down, or remove the need to sit down at all.
The Automation ROI Calculator can help you estimate the return on building those automations. The upfront cost is usually recovered in under three months.
If you're not sure which meetings to replace first, book a free 30-minute call and we'll help you pick. We build the dashboards and automated reports that can replace them, pulled live from your own systems.
