Your inputs
Defaults are placeholders
5
Unanswered, after hours, or while the line was busy.
$300
Your own figure, before costs.
30%
Of the enquiries you do speak to.
A WEEK
$450
A MONTH
$1,949
A YEAR
$23,400
What the arithmetic actually says
The calculator multiplies three numbers you supply. Calls missed in a week, the value of an average job, and the share of enquiries you close. The product is a weekly figure, and fifty times that is a rough year.
Each input is an estimate, and the errors compound. Overstate each of the three by a tenth and the product lands about a third too high. Enter cautious numbers instead. If the answer still looks large, that is the useful signal.
The arithmetic gives you a size, not a bill. It tells you whether the phone is a rounding error or one of the bigger holes in the business. That is worth knowing, and it is roughly all the sum is good for.
Why the result is a ceiling
The close rate you enter comes from calls you answered. Applying it to calls you did not answer assumes the two groups are the same people in the same mood. They are not.
The missed pile also holds calls that were worth nothing. Suppliers, recruiters, robocalls, wrong numbers, a customer chasing an invoice, and the same person ringing three times in four minutes. A raw count treats all of that as lost work.
So read the output as an upper bound. The recoverable figure sits somewhere below it. Finding out how far below means recovering some calls and counting what happens.
Why a returned call converts worse
Someone who rang and got no answer is, for the next few minutes, still deciding. The next number in the search results is one tap away. Urgent work tends to go to whoever picks up first.
By the time you ring back, the ground has usually shifted. They may have booked someone else. They may be back at work and unable to talk. Or they answer, and the conversation starts from the fact that you did not pick up earlier.
Phone tag eats the rest. Your callback reaches their voicemail, theirs reaches yours, and the enquiry dies without anyone deciding anything. Response time matters more than callback volume.
How to count missed calls properly
Do not rely on the handset's missed-call list. Forwarding, simultaneous ring and voicemail all distort it, in both directions. Pull the log from the carrier or the phone system instead, which records what reached the line.
Then classify a week of it by hand. Mark each record as a genuine unanswered enquiry, a repeat attempt from a number you already counted, a non-sales call, or spam. An hour of this replaces a lot of guessing.
Decide in advance what counts as missed. Rang out, engaged, abandoned on hold, and out of hours are four different problems with four different fixes. Out-of-hours calls in particular may not be losses, if the caller rings back in the morning.
The numbers worth tracking afterwards
Once you start responding to missed calls, track them as their own group. Three figures are enough. How long until first response, what share of those callers you reach at all, and what share of the reached callers book something.
That third number is your recovered close rate. Expect it to sit below your close rate on answered calls. Substitute it into the calculator and the estimate stops being a ceiling and starts being a forecast.
Attribute cautiously. A caller you rang back, who had also filled in your form and then walked into the shop, is not proof that the callback did the work.
When answering faster is the wrong fix
If you are booked out three weeks and already turning work away, answering more calls adds little revenue. It adds admin, and a queue of people you disappoint later. Capacity or price is the constraint, not the phone.
The standard claim in this space does not fully hold up either. A missed call is not automatically a lost customer. Some callers do ring back, particularly for work only you do, or when they were referred to you by name.
Cheaper options deserve a hearing before software does. Voicemail-to-text, ringing two mobiles at once, a shared line, or a human answering service billed by the minute. If one of those closes the gap, buy that one.
A missed-call calculator sizes the hole in your phone coverage, not the money sitting on the other side of it.
Tell us what you want to improve.
A short call to work out what the job is and put a number on it.