We’re really excited to share with you a spreadsheet that we created to compare what you can make at a part-time or full-time, brick-and-mortar job, or a job working outside the home to an at-home transcription job.
You can download the spreadsheet here: Download
So, let’s go ahead and look at our spreadsheet. We’re going to start on the side with the brick-and-mortar job. Sally thinks that she can find a job for £10 an hour. She can work 80 hours a month, or 20 hours a week.
So, if we look, her gross monthly income is £800. Now, let’s fill out her monthly expenses. She plans to work while her older children are in school. Her childcare for her child still at home is £250 a month. Gas to get back and forth to work is £50 a month, and her payroll taxes are calculated for her.
Since she will be employed outside of the home and is not self-employed with this job, she only has to pay her side of payroll taxes. It seems like £10 an hour isn’t enough for her. If we plug in £12 an hour, she does better, but it’s still not £800 a month. If we put in £15 an hour for a job, which is hard to find for part-time work in her area, she can make £800 after expenses. So, she knows she needs to make at least £15 per hour if she is working outside the home.
Now, let’s go to the other side of the spreadsheet and look at transcription earnings. We’ll start by filling out the audio hour rate. Sally figures that even though she’s a beginner, she has good skills and can earn £40 an audio hour. This is the lowest that we would recommend working for, and would encourage Sally to keep applying to get higher-paying contracts as soon as she can. Next, we’re going to enter her turnaround time or TAT ratio.
This is how many hours it takes to transcribe one hour of audio. She knows that the first month or two she may be fairly slow, but she figures that soon she should be at the industry standard of four to one. So, we’ll go ahead and put four in. Let’s put in 80 hours again for her hours. We can see that her gross monthly wage is £800, but we need to enter her expenses. She’s planning on working when her children are taking naps or asleep at night so she doesn’t need to pay for childcare.
This might be a cost for full-time transcriptionists or transcriptionists whose contracts require them to work when their children are home and awake. For miscellaneous business expenses, we’re going to put an average of £15 per month. Some months, she won’t have any expenses, while other months, she might pay £25 to £50 for a piece of software or a tool that increases her productivity.
Her payroll taxes are automatically calculated. She will be paying both the employer and employee side of taxes when she files her income taxes in the spring. This spreadsheet only accounts for payroll taxes. It does not include any other income taxes she will be liable for. As you can see, the net income is about £660. So, let’s see what she needs to do to get to £800 a month.
First, let’s say that she finds a contract that pays £50 an audio hour. Now, she’s working the same amount of hours and is making her goal. If she were to increase her ratio to 3.5, she would be at over £900. If she finds a contract after several months that pays £60 an audio hour, even if we change the turnaround time back to four hours, she is now making over £1,000 a month after expenses. So, this spreadsheet was something we created just for fun. Since everyone is different, plug your own numbers into the spreadsheet to see if becoming a transcriptionist would work for you. Remember, that with more experience and good skills, it’s easier to find contracts that pay, on average, £60 per audio hour.
