How the calculation works
Opening hours. Hours to cover a year = hours per day × days per week × 365 ÷ 7. Business hours, 8 hours × 5 days, come to 2,085.7 hours, slightly more than one technician’s 2,080 paid hours, before any time off.
Productive hours per technician = paid hours per week × 52 − days off × (paid hours per week ÷ 5). Days off = PTO + holidays + training + sick days, each counted as one fifth of the weekly hours. The defaults (40 hours; 15, 10, 10 and 5 days) give 1,760 hours. They are planning assumptions, not published figures.
Coverage FTE = technicians available at once (seats) × opening hours ÷ productive hours.
Ticket workload. Hours a year = tickets per day × minutes per ticket ÷ 60 × days open a year. Workload FTE = those hours ÷ (productive hours × the share of time on tickets, 70% by default). Tickets are assumed to arrive while the desk is open and to be worked evenly through the day.
Tier 1 technicians = the larger of coverage FTE and workload FTE, rounded up. Tier 2 and tier 3 = tier 1 ÷ the ratio you set, rounded up. Users per technician = users supported ÷ total headcount. Annual cost = headcount × the loaded cost you enter.
Worked example
A help desk open 8×5 for 1,200 users, with two technicians available at all times, 80 tickets a day at 15 minutes of tier 1 work each, one tier 2 technician per five tier 1, and $95,000 loaded cost per person (an example input):
- Coverage: 2 × 2,085.7 ÷ 1,760 = 2.37 FTE
- Tickets: 80 × 15 min = 20 hours a day × 260.7 days open = 5,214.3 hours a year ÷ 1,232 = 4.23 FTE, about 3.6 technicians busy on average through the day
- The workload is larger, so 5 tier 1 technicians; tier 2: 5 ÷ 5 = 1
- Total: 6 people, or 200 users per technician
- Cost: 6 × $95,000 = $570,000 a year
Cutting handle time to 12 minutes, through better self-service or a knowledge base, brings the ticket work to 3.39 FTE and tier 1 to 4.
Ways to reduce the headcount
The two inputs that move the result most are tickets per day and minutes per ticket. Password resets and access requests are good candidates for self-service. Endpoint management tools fix some problems before users notice them. A managed help desk can take after-hours or overflow tickets so your own staff cover the core business day; run the calculator for the hours you keep in-house and compare the cost with quotes for the rest.
