What a renewal costs you today, and after.

What this calculator is

Enter your proposal volume, current preparation time, estimated time with Planlined, staff hourly cost and the monthly equivalent of your quoted subscription amount. The calculator estimates time value, then subtracts the subscription cost you enter. Use the amount quoted for your subscription. These estimates are not measured customer outcomes.

Nothing in the result comes from customer telemetry, a benchmark study or an average across our users. That is also why Minutes each with Planlined is an input rather than a fixed figure. An earlier version of this page hardcoded it, which meant the page reported the same percentage to everyone who loaded it, however they actually worked. If you want the output to tell you something true, that is the field to think hardest about.

Where the “hours per proposal, by hand” number comes from

Most brokers underestimate this, because they count only the part that feels like the work: building the deck. Time one renewal end to end instead, from the moment the carrier packet lands to the moment the proposal is ready to present. In practice it is five separate jobs.

• Collecting and chasing the files. The renewal quote, the current invoice, the ancillary proposals, the SBCs, and the rate sheet that arrived in a different email from a different person.
• Keying rates into the spreadsheet. Four tiers per plan, per carrier, plus deductibles, copays, coinsurance and out-of-pocket maximums.
• Checking totals. Re-adding annual employer cost, confirming tier counts against the invoice, and hunting the one cell that points at the wrong row.
• Building the deck. Laying out the comparison, writing the contribution scenarios, applying your branding, exporting, and exporting again after a late change.
• The revision. The client asks what happens if the employer absorbs half the increase, and two of the four jobs above happen a second time.

Add those up for one case you finished recently and use that figure. If the honest answer is three hours, enter three, not six. An inflated input produces an inflated ROI that will not survive its first month of contact with your calendar.

Choosing your cost and time inputs

Proposals per month

Count the last twelve months and divide, rather than extrapolating from a busy-season week. Renewal work is seasonal, so an October number overstates the year.

Minutes each with Planlined

This is your estimate of review and edit time, not processing time. Budget for reading extracted values against the source page, correcting whatever is flagged, setting contributions, and looking the output over before it goes to a client — that review is a real step, described on document parsing. If you have not used the product yet, a conservative guess is more useful than an optimistic one, and a free trial is available, so you can replace the guess with what it actually took.

Staff hourly rate

Use the fully loaded cost of whoever does the work: the account manager's rate, if the account manager builds the proposals, not a principal's. If it is your own time, choosing your billable value rather than your salary changes the result substantially — so be explicit with yourself about which one you entered.

What the result is not

The output is a planning estimate: what the arithmetic says those hours are worth if your assumptions hold. It is not a promise, a guarantee or an observed outcome, and it excludes most of what makes a real first quarter messier than a model.

• Learning time. The first case takes longer than the tenth. The model charges you nothing for it.
• Edge-case documents. A carrier format without a purpose-built reader goes through the general reader, and unclear values are flagged for review rather than guessed. Confirming those flags is real time the model does not add.
• Work that is not proposal building. Renewal strategy, carrier negotiation, enrollment meetings and service escalations are untouched by any of this.
• Whether the recovered hour turns into money. Time saved is only worth your hourly rate if the hour is refilled with something that earns — more cases, deeper client work, less unpaid overtime. If it simply evaporates, the dollar figure stays theoretical.
• Timing. The subscription is a cash cost from month one; the time value accrues only as you actually build proposals.

Sanity-check it against one real case

Before you trust the percentage, test the model against a renewal you remember clearly. Take the last one you built by hand, enter the hours it genuinely took, your best estimate of review time, and the rate of the person who did it. Then ask a single question: is the monthly time saved a number I could point at in my calendar? If the model hands back forty hours a month and your whole team spends thirty hours a month on proposals, an input is wrong — almost always the hours-by-hand figure or the proposal count. Checking one case you can picture catches that far faster than auditing the percentages.

If you want the process the estimate is modelling, the benefit proposal workflow guide walks through the same renewal step by step, and product facts lists plainly what the software reads, produces and does not do.