The Planning Gap Calculator

Get your number in 30 seconds.

Move the sliders to see a personalized estimate of your firm's annual planning gap. The planning gap is the annual cost of manual scheduling overhead, underutilized capacity, and margin lost when project plans don't match reality.

Your firm

Billable headcount Full-time billable staff, including partners who bill time

50 people

Average bill rate Blended rate across all billable staff

$175/hr

Current planning method How does your team manage project and capacity planning today?

Spreadsheets

PM tool

Multiple tools

Dedicated PSA

Weekly planning hours Hours your team spends on scheduling, capacity planning, and forecasting, per week across the whole firm

12 hrs/week

Current utilization rate Billed hours as a percentage of available hours

68%

Not sure

Go deeper

The Planning Gap Grader

9 questions. 60 seconds. Find out exactly which dimension is driving your number.

Find out exactly where the gaps are

Showing estimates for a typical mid-size agency. Move the sliders to match your firm.

YOUR ESTIMATED ANNUAL PLANNING GAP

$1,289,000

Based on a 50-person firm billing $175/hr at 65% utilization

CATEGORY 1

$39,000

Manual planning labor

Time spent on scheduling, capacity planning, and forecasting that dedicated software eliminates.

CATEGORY 2

$823,000

Utilization gap revenue

Revenue left on the table because manual planning can't keep utilization near the 85% target.

CATEGORY 3

$428,000

Margin leakage

Project margin lost to misalignment between planned and actual staffing when plans change mid-engagement.

How we calculate this

Manual planning labor. Weekly planning hours times 52 weeks times the estimated cost of whoever's doing that work (roughly half your average billable rate). Spreadsheet-driven teams typically eliminate about 65% of that overhead when they switch to dedicated software.

Utilization gap revenue. Total available hours (headcount times 1,880 per year, which is 2,080 standard minus 200 for PTO and holidays), times your average rate, times the utilization improvement your planning method can realistically unlock. Spreadsheet users typically recover about 5 percentage points when they move to a dedicated tool. The model caps at 85% utilization. If you're already there, this is $0.

Margin leakage. Profit lost to mis-staffed projects, scope drift, and write-offs. We estimate it as a percentage of your total billable capacity: 4% for spreadsheet users down to 0.6% for dedicated PSA users, based on SPI Research benchmarks and Parallax customer data.

Categories 2 and 3 overlap, so the total is directional. These are conservative estimates. Actual Parallax customer improvements have typically been larger.

See how Parallax closes the gap

+199%

Revenue growth at a mid-size agency after closing their planning gap with Parallax. Anonymous, verified outcome.