Meeting Cost Live Meter

What this tool does

CM8-332 puts a price on the clock. You enter who is in the room and what they cost, press Start, and the figure climbs in real time. It converts salaries into a true cost an hour including employer on-costs, projects what the meeting will have cost at its planned finish, prices the overrun separately, annualises anything recurring, and keeps a log so that next quarter you are arguing from evidence instead of impressions.

It runs entirely inside this one file — no account, no upload, no network request. Salary figures are among the most sensitive data any organisation holds, and they should never be typed into a web service to satisfy curiosity about a meeting.

Running a meeting with it

• Set it up once. Enter the people who normally attend and their basis. For a standing meeting this is a five-minute job you never repeat.
• Set the planned length and how often it happens. Both feed the projection and the annual figure.
• Write down what has to be decided. It is not used in any calculation. It is there because a meeting with no decision to make is the one this tool most often turns out to be measuring.
• Press Start when the meeting starts — not when it was scheduled to start. The gap between those two is itself worth knowing.
• Drop attendance to 50% for anybody who leaves halfway, or who was only needed for one item. Attendance is the only variable anyone can change while the meeting is running.
• Log it at the end. The meter resets and the record is kept.

How the cost an hour is built

An annual salary is divided by the paid hours in a year, then loaded for what the employer pays on top. Three inputs decide the answer, and all three are in Settings because all three are genuinely different between organisations: contracted hours a week, working weeks a year, and the on-cost percentage.

A day rate is divided by a fifth of the weekly hours — so on a 40-hour week, a day is 8 hours. An hourly rate is used as entered. Contractors and agency staff are usually best entered on their actual rate: on-costs are already inside it, so consider setting their loading to zero by entering the all-in figure and accepting that the tool's percentage applies. If that matters to you, enter their true cost as an hourly rate and set the on-cost percentage to reflect your permanent staff, since they are the majority.

On-costs and overhead — the honest bit

On-costs are real and should be included. Employer social security or payroll taxes, pension contributions, insurance and paid benefits are money the organisation actually spends to have that person available. Twenty to thirty-five per cent covers most jurisdictions; check yours, because the range across countries is very wide.

Overhead absorption is optional and defaults to zero, deliberately. Loading premises, equipment and support costs onto an hourly rate is standard practice in some finance functions and absent in others. It roughly doubles the number, which makes it tempting for anybody who wants a dramatic figure. Use it only if your finance team does. Inflating a number to win an argument is not analysis, and it is the fastest way to have the whole exercise dismissed.

Why working weeks matter more than people expect

Dividing an annual salary by 52 weeks assumes nobody ever takes leave. Once statutory holidays, annual leave and typical absence are removed, most full-time employees are available for something like 44 to 48 weeks. Using 52 understates every hourly cost by roughly a tenth — and it is the single commonest error in homemade versions of this calculation.

Preparation and follow-up

The meeting is not the whole cost. Somebody wrote the pack, six people read it, and one person spent forty minutes writing the notes. The preparation setting adds a fixed number of minutes per attendee to the total, once, at each person's own rate.

It is deliberately kept out of the live burn rate. The rate on screen is what is being spent right now; preparation was spent earlier and follow-up will be spent later, and blending them would make the live figure a fiction.

The annual figure

A one-off meeting costing a few hundred is an anecdote. The same meeting held weekly is a budget line nobody has ever approved, and that is what the annual figure exists to expose.

Frequencies are converted using working periods rather than calendar ones: daily means 230 working days, weekly means 46 weeks, fortnightly 23, monthly 12, quarterly 4. Until the meeting has actually run, the annual figure uses the planned length; afterwards it uses what it really took, because that is the honest basis and it is usually the larger number.

The log, and what to do with it

Each logged meeting records the date, the name, how many people, planned against actual minutes, the cost and the cost a minute. Three things become visible after a month or two, and none of them are visible from memory:

• Which meetings systematically overrun. A meeting that always takes fifty minutes is a fifty-minute meeting booked for thirty. Book it properly rather than starting every week already late.
• Which recurring meeting is the largest single line. It is very rarely the one people complain about.
• How much of the total is attendance rather than duration. Halving a meeting's length saves what removing half the people saves — and the second is usually easier to arrange.

Using this without poisoning the room

A live cost meter on a screen can be a genuinely useful discipline or a piece of passive aggression, and the difference is entirely in how it is introduced. Some things worth doing:

• Use roles, not names. "Quality manager" makes the point; putting a colleague's salary on a screen in front of their peers does not, and in many places is a disciplinary matter.
• Measure your own meetings first, especially the ones you chair.
• Never use it to interrupt somebody. The purpose is to change what gets scheduled, not to hurry a person mid-sentence.
• Expect the answer to be "this was worth it". Frequently it is. A meter that only ever gets quoted when it supports cancelling something will be recognised as an instrument of policy rather than a measurement, and ignored accordingly.

What the number is not

It is not waste. Cost and value are different quantities. The meeting that costs the most in your log may be the most valuable thing your organisation does that week.

It is not a saving. Cancelling a meeting does not put money back in the bank — those people are salaried and will be paid regardless. The gain is the hours released, and only if something better is done with them. Presenting cancelled meetings as cash savings is the fastest way to lose the argument with anybody numerate.

It is not opportunity cost either. The true economic cost is the value of what those people would otherwise have produced, which is real, usually larger, and not knowable from a spreadsheet.

The formulas

FAQ

I do not know what people earn. Use band midpoints, or a single average for everybody. The conclusion — that eight people for an hour is expensive — survives a large margin of error. Precision here buys you very little.

What if somebody joins halfway? Set their attendance to 50%, or add them when they arrive. The meter prices attendance, not the calendar invitation.

I closed the tab with the meter running. It keeps running: the elapsed time is worked out from the clock, not from the page being open. That is correct behaviour for a meeting that carried on without you, and worth remembering if you leave it running by accident — press Reset the meter.

Should I include my own time? Yes. Chairs who leave themselves out of the total are the reason the total is usually understated.

Can I use this to justify cancelling a meeting? You can use it to justify asking the question. The case for cancelling has to rest on what the meeting achieves, which this tool cannot see.

Saving your work

Attendees, meeting details, settings and the log are written to this browser's local storage as you work, and the meter's own state is saved every fifteen seconds while it runs, so a crash costs you at most a quarter of a minute.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file with everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the meeting log for spreadsheet work. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored, including the salary figures. There is no undo.

Remember what is in this file if you export it: a list of colleagues and what they are paid. Keep the backup somewhere you would keep a payroll extract.

Accuracy & disclaimer

Every figure here derives from the salary and on-cost assumptions you entered, spread over the working hours you specified. It is an approximation of employment cost, not an accounting figure, and payroll will not recognise it. It takes no account of what those people would otherwise have been doing.

This meter measures cost, not waste. Use it to prompt a conversation about whether the right people are in the room for the right length of time. Do not use it to shame colleagues, and be careful where salary information is displayed — in many organisations, and under many contracts of employment, that is confidential information belonging to the individual.