Meeting Cost Calculator 02-28-2023 00:20 AM - last edited 02-28-2023 00:51 AM

[MattGroves]

Why we built it

After a rather lengthy meeting with a large number of people, I was grabbing a coffee with one of our client stakeholders who asked “I wonder how much that meeting just cost us?” So I built this App as a bit of fun, but also to show how meetings that lack structure can be a huge drain on organisational time (and money).

How we built it

The App was built in the Power Platform, using the mobile layout. It’s some data fields and a calculation, nothing you couldn’t do in Excel – but this is far more useable and has a far better user experience!

App features

Cost calculator Use this screen to calculate (roughly) the cost of meetings, especially recurring meetings.  Set the sliders to the values you require and the cost is calculated. Select a recurrence value if required.
Meeting timer Use this screen to help focus you on the costs being incurred “live” during a meeting. Open the screen at the start of the meeting and hit “start” – watch the costs ramp up!

Note: Figures are approximations and should not be used for anything other than informational purposes.

Downloads

Documentation

Solution (managed)

MSAPP

Contact

www.bigsixty.co.uk

[MatteoSaitta]

Hello, if you have still desire to develop this solution, being able to customize the currency (like using EUR instead of GBP) would help a lot for international customers. We managed to switch currencies by hand but a less technical inclined users could help having a picker in the about window to choose with.

[jsater]

Edit: I see the About page includes 240 days/yr and 7.5 hrs/day.  Incorporating this into my model, there is still a 1.5x coefficient (updated below)

Thank you so much for this; I do have one question though.  Rebuilding this in Excel to understand it better (I'm a Power Apps novice), what is the reason for having a 1.5 coefficient in the calculation?

For example, if I enter 80K $/yr, for 6 people, and 30 minutes, the App results in $200 for the meeting.

Doing the math manually, converting the average salary to cost per minute, and multiplying that by 6 and 30, I get an approximate cost of just $27.38, not $200.  So, adding a multiplier of 1.5, I can reach the stated $200.

Then, changing any of the salary, cost per minute, or attendees variables (while including this extra multiplier), I can exactly match the PowerApp output for the same variable selections.

What is the reason for the 1.5 coefficient?

Thank you so much!

[MattGroves]

jsater - the 1.5x multiplier is to allow for the additional overhead costs associated with employing staff, as mentioned on the About screen:

There are way too many variables for each individual, each job, each industry, each company, each country (etc) to be precise with this, so we went with a simple 50% of salary.

HTH

[jsater]

Thank you so much, Matt!  That makes a lot of sense. 🙂