What your empty back-office seat really costs

How to use it

The worksheet has three parts. Part A is what a year of the hire costs once you find someone. Part B is what the gap costs while the seat is empty. Part C adds them up and gives you a number to compare with any alternative. A worked example for an accounts receivable clerk comes after the worksheet, and the sources are at the end.

Use your own numbers wherever you have them. The national figures are there for when you don’t.

Part A: a year of the hire

Part B: the cost of the gap

Your hourly value (for B3)

Pick the highest of these that’s realistic for you:

• Your yearly pay (salary plus what you take out of the business) ÷ 2,000 working hours.
• What you bill a client for an hour of your time, if you bill by the hour.
• What you’d have to pay someone to do the work you’re not doing while you cover the seat: sales, estimating, managing jobs.

Late invoices (for B6)

When nobody is chasing, customers pay later. You can measure that with DSO, days sales outstanding: how many days, on average, it takes to get paid.

Part C: compare

Worked example: an accounts receivable clerk

A business with $2.4 million a year in invoiced sales loses its AR clerk. The owner covers the work. Pay is the BLS May 2025 US median for bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks, the group the BLS uses for AR and AP clerks. The other inputs are example assumptions, marked as such: swap in your own.

What the example shows

• The hire costs about $72,400 a year, not $50,670. Benefits and payroll taxes add about 43% on top of the salary.
• The gap costs about $13,600 here, and most of it is the owner’s time. At 15 hours a week or $150 an hour, that line grows fast.
• $65,750 sits in late invoices for two months. The interest on it is small. The risk that some of it never comes in is not.
• The salary you don’t pay during the gap ($11,136) roughly offsets the gap, but only if your hours really are worth $100 and you had them spare. For most owners, those hours come out of selling and running the business.

For the cost of the same role in your city, see what an accounts receivable clerk costs in 65 US cities (usedull.com/cost/accounts-receivable-clerk). To do the owner-time and hiring math on screen, use the empty seat calculator (usedull.com/tools/empty-seat-calculator).

What this worksheet leaves out

Training time, turnover if the new hire leaves, mistakes while someone learns, and jobs that slip while you cover the seat. They’re real, but hard to put a number on, so we left them out rather than guess.

Sources

• Median pay: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks (43-3031): bls.gov/oes/current/oes433031.htm
• Wages as 70.0% of total compensation, private industry: BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026: bls.gov/news.release/ecec.nr0.htm
• Median 39 days to fill: SHRM recruiting benchmarks: shrm.org/topics-tools/research/recruiting-benchmarking
• Average cost per hire of nearly $4,700: SHRM: shrm.org/topics-tools/news/talent-acquisition/real-costs-recruitment