Methodology
Support Cost per Account Planner methodology
Educational only: Business decision support, not accounting, tax or legal advice.
Privacy: Calculations run locally; Margin101 does not receive your commercial inputs.
Update policy: Reviewed when formulas or official dependencies change.
Scope: Market-neutral small-business planning using your own assumptions.
1. Formulas and units
totalSupportCost = support hours × loaded labour rate + tools and vendorsWhere
- supportLabourHours
- Support labour hours (whole or operational units)Source: Business record
- loadedLabourRate
- Loaded labour rate (currency units on one consistent basis)Source: Business record
- toolsAndVendors
- Tools and vendor cost (currency units on one consistent basis)Source: Business record
- totalSupportCost
- Total support cost (money)Source: Calculated output
supportCostPerAccount = total support cost ÷ active accountsWhere
- activeAccounts
- Active accounts (whole or operational units)Source: Business record
- totalSupportCost
- Total support cost (money)Source: Calculated output
- supportCostPerAccount
- Support cost per account (money)Source: Calculated output
supportCostPerTicket = total support cost ÷ handled ticketsWhere
- tickets
- Handled tickets (whole or operational units)Source: Business record
- totalSupportCost
- Total support cost (money)Source: Calculated output
- supportCostPerTicket
- Support cost per ticket (money)Source: Calculated output
Money inputs and outputs use the currency selected in the scenario without changing the canonical methodology. Rates, margins, utilisation and buffers are entered as percentages and converted to decimal values for calculation.
2. Worked example
Input assumptions
Worked values below come from the same registered engine and visible default assumptions.
Calculation and outputs
Example
Worked values below come from the same registered engine and visible default assumptions.
- Total support cost
- 6,000.00 currency units
- Support cost per account
- 60.00 currency units
- Support cost per ticket
- 30.00 currency units
The exact engine-derived outputs are shown in the labelled rows below.
Interpretation
Use the per-account and per-ticket results to understand the entered allocation, not as an industry efficiency benchmark.
3. Validation and boundary checks
- All inputs must be finite and non-negative.
- Active accounts and tickets must be whole numbers.
- A zero denominator returns an explicit unreachable result.
- Total support cost reconciles labour hours times loaded rate plus tools and vendors.
4. Assumptions and source classification
- Loaded labour includes only costs the user chooses to allocate.
- Accounts, tickets, labour and tools use one consistent support period.
This planner has no current policy-data dependency. Its commercial assumptions are user supplied. Registered family-level regression suites exercise the shared business-logic engine and worked-result reconciliation.
5. Limitations
- The result does not classify accounting costs or recommend an efficiency benchmark.
- It does not replace financial, accounting, tax or legal advice.
This is educational decision support, not tax, accounting, legal or financial advice. Check the treatment of your actual transactions under the rules that apply to your business and seek qualified advice where appropriate.
6. Update and evidence policy
Registered family-level suites test formula invariants and example reconciliation; the release ledger records that coverage without claiming a separate oracle for every line of public copy. There is no official threshold or benchmark to refresh for this planner. Commercial inputs remain user-supplied because they vary by business and contract.
Change history
- : Initial public release of the Support Cost per Account planner and methodology.
Related reading
Guides to interpret the decision and its assumptions.
- SaaS Unit Economics: Contribution, CAC, Churn and Cash
Connect contribution, acquisition cost, retention and cash timing while keeping cohort and horizon boundaries explicit.
Read guide