What one more person actually costs
A wage is the smallest part of a hire. On top of it sit payroll taxes, workers' compensation, holiday pay and insurance, and together they are the labor burden. That percentage is yours. It moves with your province, your trade and your claims history, so read it off your own payroll rather than borrowing a figure. Add the truck, the phone and the tools and you have the fully-loaded cost, which is the only number worth comparing anything to.
The comparison itself is where most of these sums go wrong. A person has to cover their cost out of gross profit, not out of revenue. If a job bills 1,800 dollars at a 45 percent margin, it contributes 810 dollars, so the jobs needed are the loaded cost divided by that 810, not by the 1,800. Divide by the weeks you actually work and you get the weekly target, which is the version you can hold someone to.
Read the ramp-up alongside it. Nobody is fully productive in week one, and those weeks cost the full rate with nothing coming back. The common mistake is planning the hire off a busy fortnight instead of a normal one, so the target looks easy in July and impossible in February.
Zeus keeps clock-in hours, materials and invoices on the job they belong to, so after a couple of months you can check the real jobs finished against the number this tool asked for.
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