What is your empty back-office seat costing you?
An open AR, AP or admin seat costs more than the salary you aren’t paying. Put in your own numbers to see owner time, cash waiting in overdue invoices and the cost of hiring, then compare it with a fixed quote from Dull.
How the numbers are worked out
- Owner time while the seat is empty = hours a week × what an hour is worth × weeks empty.
- Cash waiting = what is sitting in invoices over 30 days old. It isn’t lost yet, but you can’t use it, and older invoices are harder to collect.
- Recruiting = $4,700, based on SHRM’s benchmark that the average cost per hire is nearly $4,700. Yours may be higher with a recruiter or lower with referrals.
- A year of the hire = salary ÷ 0.70. Across private industry, wages and salaries are 70.0% of what employers spend per hour worked, and benefits make up the rest (BLS, June 2026).
The default salary of $49,210 is the May 2024 median for bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Change it to what you would actually pay.
What this calculator leaves out
It doesn’t count training time, turnover, mistakes made while someone is learning, or the jobs that slip while you cover the seat. Those are real, but they’re hard to put a number on, so we left them out rather than guess.
Compare on the work, not the job title. Dull’s standard pilot covers up to 300 standard records a month, such as one order, one invoice or one form each, with a person reviewing every exception. If the seat is more than that, we’ll scope it with you on a call.
Next step
Compare it with a fixed Dull quote: book a 15-minute call and we’ll give you one flat monthly fee for the work, month to month. Or run a free back-office check and we’ll send a one-page plan.