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Professional Services Downtime Cost Calculator
For law firms, accounting practices, and consultancies, the product is billable time — and IT downtime destroys it directly. When document management, practice management, or email goes down, professionals cannot bill, deadlines do not move, and work compresses into evenings and weekends. Client expectations around responsiveness make even short outages visible.
That said, professional services firms often have more downtime flexibility than businesses with physical operations: work can sometimes be shifted, and revenue is frequently deferred rather than permanently lost. Deadlines get met with recovered hours; matters rarely walk away over a single outage. For that reason this calculator applies a 0.8 revenue multiplier for professional services — a deliberately conservative choice that avoids overstating the revenue impact.
What remains is still substantial: fully loaded labor cost for interrupted staff, plus revenue at risk during client-facing periods like filing season or trial preparation. The full formula and every assumption are published on the methodology page. Use the Advanced assumptions section to match the model to your firm's actual downtime history.
Professional Services downtime — common questions
Why is the professional services multiplier below 1.0?
Because knowledge work often defers rather than destroys revenue — a missed afternoon can be recovered before a filing deadline. The 0.8 multiplier keeps the estimate honest instead of inflating it. Your exposure may be higher during peak periods like tax season.
Should I count all employees or only billable staff?
Count everyone whose work stops during an outage — billable professionals and support staff alike. The salary field takes your firm-wide average; if billable staff dominate the affected group, use their average salary instead for a more accurate figure.
Our files are in the cloud — are we still exposed to downtime?
Cloud services reduce some risks but your firm still depends on internet connectivity, identity/login systems, and local devices. Outages in any of those layers stop work just as effectively as a server failure. The calculator is agnostic about where the failure occurs.
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