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Managed IT service: Why is salary divided by paid hours too low?

Convert staff cost into a delivery-hour cost for pricing.

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Managed IT service / client month economics
Answer

Productive hours exclude leave, training and non-delivery time. Enter employer charges from your own payroll records.

Try this with your own numbers

Formula and worked example

Loaded cost = (pay + employer costs + allocated overhead) / productive hours

Example figures
InputExample
Annual gross pay45,000
Employer benefits and payroll costs10,000
Allocated annual staff overhead5,000
Productive annual hours1,500
Calculated result40 per productive hour

Choose reliable inputs

Include software licences, delivery time, revisions and ongoing support when costing a project. For this managed it service calculation, use project time logs, licence invoices and retainer scopes and a consistent definition of one client month.

  • Licenses: include the portion belonging to this client month or reporting period, and record where the value came from.
  • Support labour: include the portion belonging to this client month or reporting period, and record where the value came from.
  • Monitoring: include the portion belonging to this client month or reporting period, and record where the value came from.

Use the same currency for every money input. Do not mix weekly costs with monthly revenue, or count the same expense in both an itemised cost and allocated overhead.

Why is salary divided by paid hours too low?

Productive hours exclude leave, training and non-delivery time. Enter employer charges from your own payroll records.

Compare a different assumption

What if this input changes?

If annual gross pay rises by 10%, this example changes by 3 per productive hour. This shows the effect of one change; it does not predict what will happen.

Open the calculator, save your baseline, then change the input supported by the least reliable estimate in your records. Compare both scenarios before committing to a price or capacity promise.

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