The cost of slide making: calculate your own team’s effort
Calculate presentation cost from the completed job, including review and export repair. Use your own labor rate, volume and subscription allocation. A vendor’s generation time is one stage of the workflow, not the cost of an approved deck. The calculation below lets you change the assumptions without borrowing an industry average.
| Question | Practical answer |
|---|---|
| Drafting | 40 minutes × 12 decks = 8 hours |
| Verification | 25 minutes × 12 decks = 5 hours |
| Export repair | 15 minutes × 12 decks = 3 hours |
| Total | 16 hours × $50 planning rate = $800 |
| Drafting reduced to 20 minutes | 12 hours × $50 = $600 before tool costs |
Worked example
Suppose a team produces twelve decks a month. Each takes 40 minutes to draft, 25 to verify and 15 to repair after export: 80 minutes, or sixteen hours a month. At an internal planning rate of 50 USD an hour, labor is 800 USD before subscriptions. Reducing drafting to 20 minutes saves four hours only if verification and repair do not increase. Track those stages separately instead of applying a vendor's generation-speed claim to the whole job.
From calculation to a defensible headline
Write the formula beside the source values before choosing a chart. A total, a rate and a change in a rate need different denominators. Round only the displayed answer so repeated rounding does not distort the comparison.
- Record period, unit and population for each input; distinguish actual results from a plan or forecast.
- Recalculate the headline independently from the chart, then check that both tell the same story.
- Turn the result into a specific decision. Keep proposed explanations as questions until separate evidence supports them.
Monthly cost equals decks × active minutes per deck ÷ 60 × hourly planning rate, plus allocated tool costs. In this calculation, reducing drafting by 20 minutes across 12 decks releases four hours. At $50 per hour that is $200 of modeled capacity value. It is not necessarily $200 less payroll. If a tool adds 10 minutes of checking and 10 minutes of repair per deck, the modeled time benefit disappears. Separate cash spending, capacity released and actual redeployment of that capacity when presenting a business case.
Put the workflow into practice
Start with your approved source in Pageworks. Review the outline, generate the deck and refine the result. Pro supports up to 50 slides and editable PowerPoint export; choose the plan that matches your handoff.
Sources and further reading
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