Overtime or Agency?
Thirty-six hours of vacancy costs $2,268 on your own staff and $3,520 through an agency. The agency only wins if your overtime multiplier reaches 2.33, and almost nobody pays that.
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After you install, this is the model to open.
Overtime or Agency?
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
What it does
Three twelve-hour shifts are uncovered next week. You can pay your own nurses overtime or you can book an agency nurse, and the argument in the office is usually about the hourly rates: $63 of overtime against $88 of agency bill rate. On those two numbers the agency looks like a 40% premium and the conversation stops there. Read the sheet instead.
Thirty-six hours of overtime is $2,268 and that is the whole cost. The agency is $88 an hour, but you pay for a 36-hour minimum whether you use it or not, and you pay for four hours of orientation before they are useful on your unit, so you are billed for forty hours. That is $3,520. The agency costs $1,252 more for the same three shifts, a 55% premium rather than 40%, and the gap is entirely in the two lines nobody quotes.
The bottom row is the one to keep. Your overtime multiplier would have to reach 2.33 before the agency broke even, and time and a half is 1.5. Even double time is 2.0 and still loses. On these numbers there is no overtime premium a normal contract contains that makes the agency the cheaper answer for a short gap. That is worth knowing before the conversation rather than after it.
Where it flips is duration, and the sheet shows you how. Raise the hours to cover to 108, three weeks of the same gap, and the orientation and the minimum stop mattering because they are paid once against far more hours. The honest rule this produces is that agency is expensive for a gap and reasonable for a vacancy, and the crossover is a number you can compute rather than a instinct you defend.
Two things it will not tell you. It costs nothing to make your own staff work a fourth shift, on this sheet, and that is false: the cost lands later as sickness and as resignations, and nothing here can price it. And an agency nurse who does not know your unit is not the same as your own nurse who does, which is a safety argument rather than a money one.
To make it yours, change the hours, your own overtime multiplier, your agency bill rate and their minimum, which is the term worth negotiating hardest.
The model
It arrives on a tab called Template: Overtime or Agency, carrying these columns:
- Hours to cover
with the model computed beside the data:
| Overtime cost an hour | 63 |
| Overtime cost for the week | 2,268 |
| Hours you actually pay for | 36 |
| Agency cost for the week | 3,520 |
| What the agency costs you on top | 1,252 |
| Overtime multiplier to break even (x) | 2.328 |
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
Next question
- Two nurses on call cost $624 on a normal night. Across ten thousand simulated nights they average $808, and the worst reaches $3,396, which is the number the stipend line never shows.How Many Nurses on Call?
- Put in the posts, the turnover and the time to fill and get back the empty posts and cover cost to expect. A 42-post unit at 19% turnover carries about two empty posts all year and $253,000 of cover. Filling posts faster matters more than losing fewer nurses, and the tornado says so.How Many Nurses Do We Need to Hire?
- Put in the patients, the nurses rostered and how often people call off and get back the odds the shift runs short. Twenty-seven patients, six nurses, four and a half each. The sheet says the shift is fine. Ten thousand simulated nights say it runs below ratio on a third of them, and call-offs, not the census, are why.Will the Roster Hold Tonight?
- Put in the shifts each nurse works and get back who carries the weekends and nights. Eight nurses, twelve shifts each, and it still is not equal: one works five weekends and one works one. The month looks fair in total hours and is not fair in the hours anybody minds.Is the Roster Fair?
- Put in the shift hours, the rate and your tax and costs and get back what the extra shift really leaves you. A twelve-hour overtime shift at $42 an hour with a night differential grosses $822 and leaves you $431.96. That is $36 an hour for a shift that pays $63, and just over half of what it looked like.Is the Extra Shift Worth It?
- Pay a little extra each month. How much sooner is it gone?How Much Sooner Does an Extra Payment End the Loan?
Every model like this one, and the method behind them: What-if analysis in Google Sheets.