TodaysBruWhat do IT help desk tickets really cost? Free calculator
Most help desk time on common tickets goes to asking questions the company already has answers to. Here is how to put a number on it.
· 3 min read · The TodaysBru team“Are you on a Mac or Windows?” Every help desk sends some version of that message dozens of times a week. Each one costs a few minutes of IT time, and a few hours of the employee’s wait, before anyone starts on the actual problem.
The math
For each type of ticket, three numbers decide the cost: how many tickets you get, how many of them open with clarifying questions, and how many rounds of questions it takes before IT can start. Multiply those by the few minutes IT spends on each round and you have the time spent asking instead of fixing.
Password resets, software requests, VPN and Wi-Fi trouble, how-to questions, and email problems make up most of a typical queue, and they are the ones where the answers (the laptop, the operating system, the approved software, the fix) already sit in IT’s records.
Try it with your numbers
Each row is pre-filled for a typical help desk. Type over any number that doesn’t match yours.
Ticket typeTickets a monthIT hours back
Password & login help7
Software & access requests6
VPN & Wi-Fi7
Software how-to4
Email & calendar2
About 27 IT hours a month back, roughly $14,500 a year of IT time.
These are starting assumptions, not customer results, and they count only the time spent asking questions. Adjust every assumption in the full calculator.
What the number leaves out
The estimate counts only the time IT spends asking questions. It does not count the fix itself, the employee’s hours of waiting, or the tickets that never get filed because chat solved the problem first, so it is the low end. It also leaves out hardware failures, where someone has to pick up the laptop and no software changes that.
The savings come from TodaysBru answering with what it already knows: the employee’s device, your standard software, and your knowledge base. Read how that works in what context-aware IT support is and how it cuts back-and-forth, or open the full ticket audit calculator to change the share, rounds, and cost for every ticket type.
For the wider business case, read how to calculate total helpdesk cost per ticket and automation ROI. It separates operating cost, released technician capacity, and actual cash savings, with a worked example.