Staffing calculators · Client profitability
Client Profitability Calculator
for staffing agencies
Gross margin shows what a client pays above pay and burden. It does not show what that client costs your team to serve. This client profitability calculator puts the two side by side for up to five clients: enter each client's hours, rates and the cost-to-serve habits you see every week, and it ranks them by gross margin and by true margin. If the order changes, you know which client conversation to have first.
Your agency
Pick a client to edit
The three clients filled in are made-up examples. Replace them with your own, and leave hours at 0 for any client you do not need.
Per week, ranked
Biggest gap between margin and profit
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| Client | Gross margin | Cost to serve | True margin | Rank |
|---|
Gross margin vs. true margin
Gross marginTrue margin
Where the cost to serve comes from
Estimate only, for planning rate and contract conversations. Weekly figures; monthly items are converted at 12 months a year. Not tax, accounting or legal advice.
How do you calculate client profitability?
Client profitability is gross margin minus the cost to serve that client. Gross margin is the bill rate minus pay and burden, times the hours billed. Cost to serve is the team time and cash that one client's way of working adds on top. The calculator works each piece out per week, so clients of different sizes compare fairly.
| Piece | How the calculator works it out (per week) |
|---|---|
| Gross margin | Hours × (bill rate − pay rate − pay × burden %) |
| Team time | Hours your team spends on order handling, timesheet chasing and invoice rework × your loaded team cost |
| Overtime billed at straight time | Those hours × half the pay rate × (1 + burden %) |
| Rush premiums you do not bill | Those hours × the premium × (1 + burden %) |
| Replacements | Replacements a month × cost each × 12 ÷ 52 |
| Fees off the invoice | Weekly billing × the fee or discount % |
| Waiting to be paid | Weekly payroll cost × (days to pay ÷ 7) × your cost of money ÷ 52 |
| Client-specific onboarding | New Crew Members a month × cost each × 12 ÷ 52 |
Which costs belong in cost to serve?
Only costs that change from one client to the next. If Crew Members forget to clock out at every site, that is a process cost for the whole agency, not one client's. If one client sends hours back as a PDF that someone retypes every cycle, or pays in 60 days while the rest pay in 30, that cost belongs to that client. Keeping the two apart is what makes the ranking honest.
What does the example show?
The largest client leads on gross margin and drops to second once cost to serve is counted. In the made-up example, Client A brings in the most gross margin, but its emailed orders, timesheet chasing, overtime billed at straight time, a 3% invoice fee and 60-day payment take a large share of it. Client B is smaller, orders ahead, approves on time and pays in 30 days, and keeps almost all of its margin.
Bottom line: a client that moves down the list is not a client to drop. It is the first conversation to have: renegotiate the terms, fix the process, or price the cost in.
For every cost behind cost to serve and the options to fix each one, depending on what the client will accept, read client profitability for staffing agencies. For the basics of markup and margin, see gross margin and how staffing agencies make money.
How NextCrew handles it
NextCrew shows margin by job, including burden and overtime, so the gross margin side of this calculator comes straight from your own data. It also shrinks the cost-to-serve side: clients can request staff and approve timesheets in the client portal, their own software can send data through the Open API, and clients who still email PDFs can keep doing it while AI reads the hours in for your team to review. Invoices follow each client's own format and carry the signed timesheets. See staffing invoicing and reporting.
Frequently asked questions
See margin by job without the spreadsheet
Margin by job including burden and overtime, client approvals in the portal, and invoices built from approved hours.