Training Cost and Break-Even Calculator

A course costs more than its invoice, and the invoice is usually the smaller half. On the figures this ships with, twelve people at $250 each plus a $1,200 trainer fee comes to $4,200 — and fourteen hours of their time comes to $5,376.

That is the number nobody counts. It does not arrive as a bill, nobody signs it off, and it is larger than the thing everybody argues about.

The second half is the part most training calculators get backwards. They ask you what the benefit will be and then compute a return on investment, which means the answer was decided by the person who typed in the benefit — and is why those answers are always flattering.

This runs the only direction that is honest. It starts from the cost, which is known, and gives you the size of the change that would cover it: about two per cent of each person’s output on the seeded figures, or about twenty-seven hours a year each. Then you decide whether that is plausible, which is a judgement you are qualified to make and a spreadsheet is not.

It does not measure whether training worked, and nothing on one page can. If you want to know that, the answer is not a number from here — it is deciding before the course what should be different afterwards, and then measuring that thing. A reaction sheet at the end of the day measures whether people enjoyed it, which is worth knowing and is a different question.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all. Two courses side by side is a very different conversation from one in isolation.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.