Every meeting cost calculator on page one does the same arithmetic well: attendees times an hourly rate times duration times frequency, sometimes with a loaded-rate multiplier for benefits and overhead. One widely-used Excel meeting-cost template even offers a per-attendee tiered-rate method for accuracy. What every version produces is a ranked list, one meeting per row, sorted by annual cost. That ranking answers which meeting is expensive. It never answers the question that actually saves money: whether two rows on that same list are quietly doing the same job.
The audit frameworks built on top of the calculator inherit the same blind spot. A representative version scores every recurring meeting against three filters: does it have a decision owner, does it produce a written outcome, and would an async update work instead. Each filter judges one meeting against itself. None of them asks whether Tuesday's roadmap review and Thursday's operational sync, each individually passing every filter, are the same conversation happening twice with half the attendees swapped out.
Callahan Ridge Software's six recurring meetings each passed a per-meeting value check and still cost $254,520 a year. Comparing every meeting's stated purpose against every other meeting's, not against a generic filter, found two problems no isolated filter would catch. Product Review and Ops Sync did the identical job for overlapping attendees, and five of ten daily-standup attendees had no open work the standup covered. Merging one pair and trimming the other, plus a shorter all-hands, cut the annual figure to $181,980: a $72,540 saving with no meeting cut to zero.
Operating Cadence Design Template