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Retreat break even calculator
Find out how many of your beds have to sell before your retreat starts putting money in your pocket.
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Retreat admin hours calculator
Count the hours a single retreat cycle takes you in intake, chasing and rooming before anyone has arrived.
Hosts price the venue and the food carefully and then hand over the admin for free. This calculator makes that donation visible. It covers three jobs that repeat on every cycle: collecting waivers, health intake, dietary needs and emergency contacts from each woman, sending payment reminders until the balance clears, and redoing the bed chart every time a friendship pair changes or someone upgrades to a single.
The defaults come from what a twelve bed retreat usually looks like when the roster lives in a spreadsheet and the paperwork lives in email. Adjust them to your own habits. If the total surprises you, that is the point: it is the number to compare against any tool, any assistant, or any decision to run three retreats a year instead of five.
Your result
Intake and paperwork hours
5.0
Waivers, health forms, dietary needs and emergency contacts across the whole group.
Payment chasing hours
3.6
Time spent moving money from promised to received.
Bed chart hours
2.0
Every reshuffle of who sleeps where, plus telling the affected guests.
Total admin hours per cycle
10.6
One registration cycle, before you have taught a single session.
This counts only registration admin, so add your program design, venue calls and marketing on top before you decide how many retreats a year you can carry.
The hours land in the worst three weeks
The total is unpleasant enough, but the distribution is worse. Very little of this work happens in the calm months after you open registration. It piles into the final three weeks, when balances come due, waivers are still missing, the kitchen wants a confirmed dietary list and two guests decide they would rather not share after all. That is also the stretch when you should be finishing your session plans.
This is why hosts describe the week before a retreat as the hardest part of the job, even though the retreat itself is longer and more demanding. Fixing it is not about working faster. It is about moving the paperwork earlier, so that intake and waivers are conditions of holding a bed rather than a chase you run at the end.
What actually cuts the number
Three changes do most of the work. Collect the waiver, health intake and dietary needs at the moment of booking rather than later, so intake minutes fall to almost nothing per guest. Put the balance dates in writing at checkout and attach automatic reminders to them, which cuts reminders per guest sharply. Keep the bed chart in one place that everyone can see, so a reshuffle is a move rather than three emails and a redrawn diagram.
Run the calculator twice, once with your current numbers and once with those habits in place. The gap between the two totals is the real question. If it is five hours a cycle, keep your spreadsheet. If it is thirty, you are paying for a system already and simply not receiving one.
Questions about this calculator
Should I count the time I spend answering questions before someone books?
No, keep that separate. Those hours are sales and they are worth spending, because they turn into deposits. This calculator measures the admin that follows a booking you have already won, which is the part that produces no new revenue at all.
My retreats are eight women, not twelve. Does the same shape hold?
Yes, though intake and chasing scale with headcount while the bed chart does not. A smaller group cuts the first two lines but you will still redo the rooming just as often, because reshuffles come from human changes rather than from the number of beds.
How do I turn these hours into a dollar figure?
Multiply the total by whatever you would pay someone competent to do it, not by your teaching rate. That gives you the honest cost of doing it yourself and a fair benchmark for any tool or assistant you are considering. Compare it against the break even calculator output on this site.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The retreat roster sheet: one row per guest, one page on arrival day
A fill in template that puts every fact you need about a guest on a single line, from her bed number to her allergy to the flight she lands on.
A number your roster can keep true
A figure you calculate once starts drifting the moment a guest upgrades to the quiet single or drops out at three weeks. In RetreatSeats the bed chart and the balances move together, so what you priced in March is still what you can read in week eleven. Ask for a demo and bring the retreat you just put through this calculator.