No-show cost calculator
An appointment nobody keeps is more expensive than a lead you never got, because you already paid for it twice: once to buy and book the homeowner, and again for the slot, the drive and the estimator's afternoon. Put in how many appointments you book a month, the share that do not happen, what a job is worth and how often a kept appointment turns into signed work, and this returns the monthly and annual cost.
It also answers the question a scheduling change actually turns on: what one point off the no-show rate is worth. That is the figure to hold a confirmation process, a reminder system or an extra call against. Nothing is stored, nothing is emailed, and the formula is printed under the result.
Appointment no-show calculator
What no-shows cost you each month
A booked appointment nobody keeps has already cost you the booking work, the drive and the slot a different homeowner could have had. Put your own four numbers in and it returns the monthly cost, plus what one point off the no-show rate is worth. The starting values are round placeholders, not a benchmark -- replace them.
Estimated revenue lost to no-shows
Per month
$39,900
Per year
$478,800
Each point off the no-show rate is worth
$1,995 per month
$23,940 a year, and there are 20 points left to take.
- No-shows per month
- 12
- Appointments actually kept
- 48
- Jobs lost with them
- 4.2
How this is calculated
No-shows per month = appointments booked x no-show rate. Multiply by your close rate on kept appointments to get the jobs that went with them, then by average job value for the monthly cost. One point of no-show rate is one percent of the month's appointments, so its value is the same arithmetic run on 1% instead of your whole rate -- which is why it does not change when you drag the no-show slider, only when you change the other three.
no_shows_per_month = appointments_per_month x (no_show_rate / 100)
lost_jobs = no_shows_per_month x (close_rate / 100)
lost_per_month = lost_jobs x avg_job_value
lost_per_year = lost_per_month x 12
value_per_point = appointments_per_month x 0.01
x (close_rate / 100) x avg_job_valueNote: every figure here is arithmetic on the inputs you typed, not a measured result or a promise of one. The values it loads with are placeholders picked to be easy to read, not an industry benchmark -- your own booking log holds the real ones, and the point value is only collectable while you still have points to remove.
Why the per-point figure is the one to act on
The headline monthly number is the size of the problem. It is also the number nobody can collect, because no scheduling process takes a no-show rate to zero -- homeowners get called into work, roofs get sold on Saturday, and some share of appointments were never really agreed to in the first place. Quoting the whole figure as recoverable is the mistake this page is trying not to make.
A point is different. It is small enough to believe and small enough to buy. If a point is worth more per month than a reminder system, an extra confirmation call the day before, or the fifteen minutes it takes to reconfirm each booking, the change pays for itself and you can stop arguing about it. If it is worth less, you have your answer just as cleanly, and the effort belongs somewhere else.
The per-point value does not move when you drag the no-show slider, and that is arithmetic rather than a bug: one point is one percent of the month's appointments whatever your current rate happens to be. What does move it is volume, job value and close rate. A shop booking twice as many appointments gets twice as much for the same point of improvement, which is why the same confirmation habit is worth arguing over in a busy season and not in a quiet one.
Measure your no-show rate before you price it
Most shops do not have this number, they have an impression of it, and the impression is usually formed by the two most annoying cancellations of the month. Count it instead. Take every appointment that was on the calendar for a month, then count the ones where the visit went ahead with the homeowner there. What is left is the rate this calculator wants. Do not quietly remove the appointments that were cancelled in advance -- a cancellation is cheaper than a wasted drive, but the booking still did not become a job, so track it as its own line rather than deleting it from the denominator.
Then split the rate by how far ahead the appointment was booked, and by who booked it. Those two cuts usually explain most of the gap on their own: an appointment made for tomorrow behaves nothing like one made for next Thursday, and a booking taken from somebody who is not the decision-maker in the household behaves worse than either.
The close rate the tool asks for is the one on appointments that actually happened, not on appointments booked. Mixing the two is the single most common way this arithmetic gets overstated, because the no-shows are then counted against you twice.
Worked example, using the numbers the page loads with
The calculator opens with sixty appointments a month, a twenty percent no-show rate, a job worth ninety-five hundred dollars and a thirty-five percent close rate. Twenty percent of sixty appointments is twelve that do not happen, leaving forty-eight kept. Applying the same close rate to those twelve no-shows is four and a fifth jobs that never got the chance to close, worth thirty-nine thousand nine hundred dollars that month and about four hundred seventy-nine thousand dollars over a year.
One point of that twenty percent -- roughly three appointments across the whole year's worth of a month -- is worth nineteen ninety-five a month on these numbers. A confirmation call that costs less than that per month to run pays for itself on the first point it recovers, and this per-point figure holds steady even as the no-show slider moves, because it is set by volume, job value and close rate rather than by the rate itself.
Where this fits
- Storm damage appointments -- how appointments get set and confirmed when volume arrives all at once and every hour of the calendar is spoken for.
- Roofing answering service -- the reconfirmation call is a phone job, and it competes for the same hour as the inbound one.
- Missed-call revenue calculator -- the earlier leak in the same funnel, for homeowners who never reached a calendar at all.
- Roofing lead ROI calculator -- what those appointments cost to create, which is the other half of what a no-show destroys.
Find out where the bookings are falling over
Bring a month of your calendar to a 20-minute call. We will split the no-shows by lead time and by who took the booking, and tell you which of the two is actually costing you.
Book a Free Consultation