Wages go out on schedule. Some of what comes back is rework, escalation, turnover, and performance conversations you have already had. This estimator puts a dollar range on that gap in about two minutes.
Built for employers with roughly 10 to 100 people. Ten questions. You see your estimate on screen before anyone asks for an email address.
Every payroll converts to performance at a loss. The number that matters is how much of yours. Answer ten questions about how work, decisions, and people actually move through your business. The estimator returns a credible annual dollar range and names your largest leak.
NO EMAIL REQUIRED TO SEE YOUR ESTIMATE · TAKES ABOUT TWO MINUTES · A ROUGH PAYROLL FIGURE IS ENOUGH
Your full snapshot covers what sits underneath your largest leak, what you are funding without seeing it, what to inspect first this week, and where your documentation exposure stands. It renders here and a copy goes to your inbox.
Twenty-five minutes with Dr. Thomas Faulkner. You bring the estimate and the recurring problem behind it. He tells you whether the pattern justifies a full Payroll-to-Performance Leak Audit, and where he would look first. If it does not, he tells you that too.
Book the ReviewPrefer to read first? See how the full Leak Audit works.
A payroll leak is the gap between what you pay for labor and what that labor actually produces. Every employer has one. Wages, salaries, overtime, and management cost go out on schedule. What comes back arrives with friction: work done twice, decisions that climb the ladder instead of getting made, positions refilled every few months, the same performance conversation held for the third time with the same person.
None of this appears on a financial statement as waste. It appears as payroll, which is exactly why it survives. The money looks correctly spent. A business owner can read a clean P&L every month while funding the same failures every cycle, because the statement records what was paid, never what was received for it.
At this size, the owner is close enough to feel every failure and stretched enough that none of them get diagnosed. Six leaks account for most of the loss.
Finished work that has to be done over because the standard for done was never written down. You pay for the labor twice and the margin goes with it.
Problems that route past your managers and land on your desk. You are paying supervisory wages for decisions you still end up making yourself, which means two salaries are covering one job.
Recruiting cost, vacancy months, coverage overtime, and a new hire operating at partial capacity on full wages. Replacement cost benchmarks commonly run from a third to half of the departing employee's annual salary, and higher for skilled or supervisory roles.
People hired into roles nobody fully defined, selected on hope, and onboarded with a tour instead of training. The wage is whole from day one. The output rarely is.
The same names in the same conversations. Correction without consequence trains the whole team on what the real standard is, and your strongest people take notes.
Files that record activity without proving judgment. This leak stays invisible until one contested termination or claim prices it all at once.
The visible costs of a departure are the job ad, the interviews, and the onboarding paperwork. The expensive part is everything around them: the months the seat sits empty while the work gets absorbed or dropped, the overtime paid to cover it, the mistakes a new person makes at full wages, and the institutional knowledge that walked out the door without a handoff.
Conservative benchmarks put the total replacement cost between thirty and fifty percent of the departing employee's annual salary. For supervisors and skilled roles, published estimates run well past one hundred percent. In a thirty-person company at average wages, three departures in one year can quietly consume the margin of a good quarter. The estimator above uses the conservative end of these ranges, on purpose.
Your income statement has a line for payroll. It has no line for the portion of payroll that bought rework instead of work, or escalation instead of supervision. Accounting is built to record transactions, and every one of these transactions was legitimate. The employee worked the hours. The manager drew the salary. The check cleared.
So the leak hides inside categories you have learned to accept: overtime that feels seasonal, management time that feels normal, turnover that feels like the labor market, and your own evenings that feel like ownership. The only way to see it is to measure the conversion, payroll in against performance out, which is precisely what a standard financial review never does.
The estimator takes two hard inputs, your headcount band and your approximate annual payroll, and eight questions about how work and decisions actually move through the business. Each answer maps to a cost band drawn from published turnover and labor-waste benchmarks and from patterns observed across the audits behind this tool. Your own cleanup hours are priced separately at a conservative owner-hour value, because your time is the most expensive labor in the building even when it never appears on the payroll register.
The bands are summed, discounted for overlap so the same dollar is never counted twice, and capped. The output is a range, not a precise figure, because a precise figure from a ten-question tool would be a lie. What the range tells you reliably is whether the leak is worth inspecting, and which direction to look first. The full Payroll-to-Performance Leak Audit exists for the moment you need a number that can hold up in a leadership meeting.
The leak is already funded. It has been in every payroll you have run this year. Run the estimate, see the range, and decide with the number in front of you.
Start the Estimate