Onboarding time-savings calculator for Aussie small business

Everyone underestimates the cost of onboarding. We ask it one of two ways — “how much do you spend?” gets a shrug. “How much do you spend training a new starter?” gets “oh, nothing really.”

Then we do the maths together. It's never nothing.

The calculator

Plug in rough numbers. It doesn't need to be precise — even a back-of-the-envelope figure will be more accurate than the number living in your head.

What the calculator actually counts

Two things most small businesses leave out of onboarding cost:

• Trainer time. Your best staff member, pulled off the floor, explaining the same things for the twelfth time this year. That's not free. It's them not serving customers, not closing sales, not finishing their own work.
• New-hire unproductive hours. The hours between “they arrived” and “they're paying for themselves.” You're paying full hourly rate for half productivity, sometimes longer than you'd like to admit.

Those two categories add up fast, and they compound every time you hire. A cafe that hires 12 people a year is often spending more on onboarding than they spend on their point-of-sale subscription for a decade.

Why the savings estimate is conservative

The calculator assumes ShiftReady halves trainer time per hire and cuts unproductive new-hire time by about a third. Those are directional numbers from owners we've worked with, not promises. Your mileage will vary depending on how much of your training is already written down and how consistent your SOPs are.

What isn't in the calculator: the savings from fewer errors, the savings from faster time-to-productivity, and the savings from higher retention because new hires feel set up rather than thrown in. Those are real — they're just harder to estimate without your numbers.

The math, if you want to DIY

The formula is simple:

Cost per hire =
    (trainer hourly rate  x  trainer hours per hire)
  + (new-hire hourly rate x  unproductive hours)

Annual cost = cost per hire  x  hires per year

Run it for your business. Then run it against whatever training system you're considering — ShiftReady or otherwise — and compare the subscription cost to the delta. The gap is often startling.

A note on time savings with ShiftReady specifically

The mechanism is simple: instead of training happening live, during trade, it happens on the phone, asynchronously, before the shift. Your trainer is no longer the bottleneck. The same SOP gets delivered the same way every single time. You stop paying twice for the same lesson.

That's the whole pitch. See how it works →