Your payback period, from four inputs.

Four numbers decide whether an agent pays for itself: how many conversations you miss, what an average job is worth, how often you close one, and what capture rate the agent achieves. Enter yours and the calculator returns recovered revenue, payback period, and the break-even capture rate.

The inputs and where to find them

• Missed conversations per week — your phone provider's or CallRail's unanswered report.
• Average ticket — total revenue divided by completed jobs last quarter.
• Close rate on answered enquiries — your own number, not an industry average.
• Agent capture rate — start at 40 percent, which is conservative for trained agents.

The output that actually matters

Not recovered revenue, which flatters everyone. The useful number is break-even capture rate: the percentage of missed conversations the agent must convert for the monthly to wash. If that number is above 25 percent for your business, be sceptical — the model is being carried by an optimistic ticket value.

What the model deliberately excludes

Staff time saved, because it is real but rarely converts to cash in a small business. Brand and review effects, because they are unmeasurable over a payback window. Excluding both keeps the output conservative, which is the correct bias when the output is going to justify a spend.