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The Good Words Documentation Impact Calculator
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Copyright Good Words LLC, 2023
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Do this first:

Download or make a copy of this calculator for your own use.

- To download a copy, select File > Download, then select your preferred file type.
- To make a copy, select File > Make a Copy.
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Welcome to the Good Words Documentation Impact Calculator!

At Good Words, we developed this calculator to help our clients determine the short- and long-term monetary impacts of investing in (or neglecting!) critical documentation projects.

In the technical communications field, it's historically been difficult to quantify the monetary impact of documentation. Good Words' goal is to empower our clients and documentation advocates all over the world with an accurate, easy-to-use tool that would help them make the case for the importance of documentation in their organizations. Thus, the Documentation Impact Calculator was born.
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Who should use this calculator?

This calculator is for anyone who is responsible for advocating, prioritizing, and budgeting for documentation and writing projects in their organizations. It's especially useful for solo technical writers, managers, and directors who need to ask for budget dollars or staffing to complete critical writing projects in their organization.
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What does this calculator do?

This calculator determines how much money your company is losing because of missing or ineffective documentation. It evaluates the costs of a few important factors: employee productivity, revenue potential, customer support costs, and lost deals.

It also helps you evaluate how much short-term and ongoing investment is required for you to solve the problem with documentation, including costs to employ writers or contractors and implement documentation tools.

There are two calculator options: one for calculating the cost of solving the problem by hiring full-time employees, and one for calculating the cost of solving the problem with contract technical writers. Play around with both to see how the budgetary impact changes with different staffing solutions.
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Calculator definitions, assumptions, and limitations

- The full-time employee (FTE) calculator assumes a modest employer cost per employee of 1.25 times an employee's base salary. This multiplier varies among employers and can be up to 1.4 times an employee's base salary or greater, depending on the company's benefits and the employee's location.

- We define an "employee" is a full-time person on your staff who works an average of 2000 hours per year, or 50 weeks at 40 hours per week.

- This version of the calculator doesn't account for variations in employment taxes from state to state or in countries other than the United States.
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About Good Words

Good Words is a premier technical writing and communications consulting firm. We deliver ongoing strategic, management, and implementation support for our clients’ technical writing needs. Our concise and accurate writing skills and ongoing strategic plans streamline even the most complex communications for some of the most technically sophisticated companies across industries, from Fortune 500 companies to 5-person startups. We provide the backbone of your customers’ success, therefore maximizing your bottom-line. For more information, visit goodwordswriting.com. We can't wait to work with you!
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Get in touch

Have questions, comments, or feedback about this calculator? Want to report a problem with our calculations? Want to find a time to chat with someone at Good Words to help you develop your business case for documentation? We'd love to hear from you!

Here are a few ways to reach us:

- Email us directly at hello@goodwordswriting.com.
- Fill out our contact form at https://goodwords.io/contact-us/.
- Connect with Good Words on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/good-words-llc/.
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