Know your worth by calculating your costs
Created: November 26, 2025 at 1:17 PM | Updated: November 26, 2025 | By SociaLink | Tūhono Pāpori
Do you know the cost of delivering your programmes and services?
"If you don’t know the costs of delivering the service, how can you communicate it to others, including funders?"
Socialink have produced information to help you 'do the numbers'.
Overview
Read Socialink's earlier post here to get an overview of the process you use to calculate your actual costs. The key points are to:
- Record the direct costs of each service or programme (materials, labour, travel, equipment etc)
- Add in the indirect costs (admin team, rent, marketing, power, insurance, accounting etc)
- Work out the percentage of indirect costs that goes towards the delivery of each of your services
- Add your direct and indirect costs to get a picture of what your services are costing you - per year, per session, and per attendee.
How do you do this?
Download the Socialink one-page How-To-Guide from the Supporting Documents section below and use the three easy steps to work out your costs.
Once you have your costs sorted out, use this information in contract negotiations, to monitor your service delivery against contracts and more.
If you are negotiating multi-year contracts or renewing contracts be sure to add CPI to keep pace with inflation.
Read another of our Socialink resources for CPI information - Applying CPI to your budget.