How many clients does it take to spend a contract?
A unit-rate contract is spent by serving enough clients, often enough, for long enough. Turning the dollars left into a number of clients gives program staff a target they can act on.
Cost per client per month
Cost per client per month = units per client per week × rate × 4.33 (weeks in a month) × (1 − miss rate), where the miss rate is the share of scheduled units that are not delivered.
Example: home-delivered meals at $9.85 a meal, 5 meals a week per client, and 5% of scheduled meals missed: 5 × $9.85 × 4.33 × 0.95 = about $203 per client per month.
Required census
Required census = the monthly billing needed to spend the rest of the contract ÷ cost per client per month.
If $480,000 is left over nine months, the contract needs $53,333 a month. At $203 per client that is about 264 active clients. If the program serves 210 today, it is 54 clients short, and the gap is what will come back unspent.
Referrals in the pipeline
Clients leave every month, and new ones often wait for the funder to approve them. Required pipeline = required census × monthly attrition × approval wait in days ÷ 30.
With 4% of clients leaving each month and a 21-day approval wait: 264 × 0.04 × 21 ÷ 30 = 7.4, so about 8 referrals that should be waiting for approval at any time, just to hold the census steady.
Use your own numbers
Units per client and attrition are best measured from your own counts: active clients, adds and exits each month. Guesses are a start; measured numbers make the target believable.
How ContractPlan helps
The census planner does this for every service on every contract, using the contract’s rates and the census counts you record, and shows the census and pipeline each contract needs next to where it is today.
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